At first only a small number of programming languages were supported, as only a few "language bundles" had been created. Even so, some developers found this early and incomplete version of TextMate a welcome change to a market that was considered stagnant by the decade-long dominance of BBEdit.

TextMate 1.0.2 came out on 10 December 2004. In the series of TextMate 1.1 betas, TextMate gained several new features, including a preferences window with a GUI for creating