>>1
Cream is so bad. They killed everything but insert mode and made up for the rest rather poorly
and they broke panes pretty bad while they were at it. Might as well use just about anything else.
>>2
Kate is boss. It's in my top 3 editors. I love the inner-block highlighting, I wish vim had that.
>>3
Haven't tried Textmate, but e is fairly good so I'd guess Textmate is the #2 choice on MacOS.