JJL  Aquamacs is now a lovely size 134.4 MB in its .app directory, somewhat voluptuous compared to twiggy TextMate's 29.9 MB. However, they both zip along gracefully on two cores clocking 2.3 GHz. A twenty-year marriage to emacs can't be without some nostalgia and a quiet reverence for the many occasions emacs has saved my life, my ambitions, or, at minimum, my sanity, on no fewer than a dozen distinct operating environments. Aquamacs 1.5, in D. Reitter's caring and thoughtful hands, shines in its elegant, talented demonstrations of refined, tested, experienced design.

In OS 10.5.5, I do prefer TextMate to any other among its peers. It is a young code-base, but plainly brilliant and prodigious. It has the great advantage of having lived it's most formative years contemporaneous with OS X, and this shows in its resilience and creativity with the networked, many-tiered problems that have come to fore in modern times.

Frankly, I adore them both.   
(Version 1.5)