[jbmorgado]

Thank you, that explains a lot, but now a new doubt came from it:

Why don't we use other text editors grammars that are simpler/quicker to parse in JS? I have no idea on the technicalities, but for instance, Vim or Emacs grammars instead?

[okdana]

I can't speak to Emacs, but i know that Vim's syntax definitions are (a) not as powerful as TM's, (b) a nightmare to maintain, and (c) heavily reliant on features specific to Vim's loony regular-expression engine (like variable-width look-around).

My experience is that most syntax highlighters and their definition formats (Scintilla, nano, almost anything that's based on JavaScript) are very limited/naïve compared to TextMate's. It doesn't have to be that way -- TM can certainly be improved upon -- but it is.