Worth the price of admission
I don’t remember anyone talking it up, but the feature that lets you link a template to a file, so that you can edit your template either in MT or in your favorite editor, completely rocks. Unlike realizing you misspelled completely while testing w.bloggar->mt.
Though it’s a bit of a pisser that HTML-Kit seems to die every time I try to open foo.php.tmpl
I found that if I used a .tmpl extension that TextPad naturally didn’t color code the HTML. I guess I could set it up to treat .tmpl documents as .html documents but I found it easier to put the tmpl at the front. But you’re right, the externally editable template feature is excellent.
I think maybe HTML-Kit uses tmpl for its own templates, and that was confusing it so severely that it needed to lock up. As you say, it probably wouldn’t have guessed how to color code .tmpl anyway. index-template.php it knows just how to handle, and now that I’m not editing in a textarea, I can actually use tabs again!