TextMate 2 alpha before Christmas?

According to a blog post at MacroMates this morning, an alpha version of TextMate 2 will be available by December 25th. As a longtime TextMate fan(atic), this news fills me with cheer usually reserved for closer to that date. A very merry Christmas, indeed.

TextMate is an extensible text editor and development tool and has been among the top contenders for developers, web designers and even writers for years now. Version 2 has been promised many times over the past few years without fulfillment. A hard timeline has even been mentioned before, but I can't help but get my hopes up for this one. Here's hoping that the MacroMates team follows through and brings us the sequel to my all-time favorite text editor.

In the meantime, Espresso 2 is coming along nicely, Sublime Text and Chocolat are rising as contenders, BBEdit is receiving plenty of love and more and more people are tackling the Vim learning curve. If and when TextMate 2 arrives, it will be up against some stiff competition.