Apologies in advance for not answering your question directly. Frankly, I wish I could have caught you before you paid for Textmate, as I would have encouraged you to try VIM.

VIM has become one of the most popular editors among Rails developers and many Textmate users are making/have made the switch (myself included). It takes a week or two to get familiar with VIM, but once you are comfortable you'll never go back to Textmate. Having just gone through the VIM learning process, I think you should do the following:

1) Download MacVIM (I assume you're on a Mac) and understand that your VIM configuration is stored in your ~/.vim folder and ~/.vimrc file

2) Search for example .vimrc files-- Tim Pope has a nice example at https://github.com/tpope/tpope/blob/master/.vimrc

3) Build your own .vimrc file from scratch-- research everything you add to your .vimrc using :help (:help is huge, don't discount this) and Google. Think of this step as building your own text editor. VIM is extremely customizable, but unfortunately it doesn't ship with all of the functionality that users expect enabled

4) Install pathogen, then install each of these plugins in the bundle folder in your .vim directory:

  - rails.vim (syntax highlighting, navigation, and much more)

  - snipmate (easily create custom code snippets)

  - nerdtree (browse project files)

  - command-t (find/open files within project easily)

  - vividchalk (color scheme)

  - ack (text search within project)

There are probably 100 other plugins people will recommend, but I think these are a good start

5) Write a blog article about your experience. I'll be posting mine soon!