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One of the (many) cool features of textmate is that it makes it very easy to pass text to other programs. You can highlight a piece of text and pass it to any command you can access from the command line and get the results back. So you can pass text to a unix command or a perl script or a ruby script - basically this means you can extend textmate using whatever command or programming language you want!

As an example, I just exported a list of albums and artists from my itunes library. The export took about 5 minutes and when it was finished the albums were listed in random order. I had expected them to be sorted by artist. To sort the list I can just highlight the text, click “Text->Filter through command” and enter sort as the command. This lets me filter the text through the unix sort command and replace it with the resulting text.

Say you want to change a piece of text to all upper-case letters (This is a contrived example for illustration purposes - there is already a command to do this in textmate). You can highlight the text and filter it through the command ruby -e 'puts $stdin.read.upcase'. This just executes a single line of ruby code to read the text that is passed in through stdin and convert it to uppercase.

If you find yourself filtering through a command repeatedly then it is easy to create a textmate command to do the task. So textmate you the full power of unix in a text editor.