1 February 2005 — Posted by Allan Odgaard

Beta 4 highlights

As previously mentioned I’ll try to showcase one or two features with each new (beta) release. This time my favorite addition is the ability to show command output as HTML. As with a lot in TextMate, don’t let the apparent simplicity fool you.

With the addition of the txmt:// custom URL scheme it is possible to have an HTML page link to a file/line/column in TextMate, and together with having the output shown as HTML, we can for example use curl to post the current buffer to W3C’s validating service and pipe the result through Perl, to have the supplied line/column information rewritten as txmt:// anchors that take us to the erroneous line (all without leaving TextMate).

The same can be done for LaTeX compile errors, but here we can take it a step further by downloading Schubert’s PDF Browser Plugin. This allows us to view PDF in our browser, and so, we do the normal thing for compile errors, but if there are no errors, we simple redirect the embedded browser to the PDF file. I have recorded a small movie which shows this in action.

Other than this, beta 4 includes a dozen minor fixes/improvements including a much improved abbreviation matcher for the file chooser (I can reach most of my 200 sources with only two letters) and the “append to lines in selection” now allows you to go back on the line to make your insertions/deletes.

Finally I should mention that you can now complete (using escape or F5) in the Find / Find in Project text fields using words from the current document.

15 Comments

  1. 01 Feb 2005 | # Ben Jackson wrote…

    I tried “append to lines in selection”, and was not able to add to the front of the selection. The cursor goes automatically to the end of the line. Interestingly, going back one word starts the append x characters from the end of the line, with x being the length of the word. This doesn’t work for going back by single chars. Is this a bug or a feature? :D

  2. 01 Feb 2005 | # Allan Odgaard wrote…

    Appending to the lines are only when they differ in length. If you want to prepend something to the lines, just use the good old column typing :)

    That is, make a column selection (holding down the option modifier key while you drag select, or make a normal selection and press/release the option modifier key once to toggle the selection type). After this, just start to type, and your typing will be mirrored for all the lines in the seleciton (the selection can be zero columns wide if you do not want to overwrite something that already exists).

    I am not sure I understand your last paragraph, but if I do, this is a feature. E.g. if you have 10 lines which end with an LI-tag you wish to add a period before this tag, activate “append to lines in selection” and move 4 characters back before typing the period.

  3. 01 Feb 2005 | # Ben Jackson wrote…

    Ah, just read the release notes (duh). So then my follow-up question is the following: is there any way to insert before selection besides doing a 0-width columnar selection? It would be nice to have this feature available via the keyboard.

  4. 01 Feb 2005 | # WEill wrote…

    Thanks for the update. I am really getting to enjoy this editor. I use it primarily for AS2.0 development and would love to get my pretty black backgrounds I used to have in the Pepper days. You have added a lot of new Language Formats, I suppose I could start with the colors from the JavaScript language and convert them to the AS2.0 one that I have.

    Do you know of anyother resources for the ActionScript?

    Also do you have anything in mind for a Syntax Language Editor?

    Thanks!

  5. 01 Feb 2005 | # Will wrote…

    Ben Jackson:

    I found a way to do what you want.

    • Move your cursor to column 1
    • Hold shift and the down or up arrows to select any number of lines you desire
    • press and release option key
    • start to type and you will be inserting in column edit mode from the beginning of the file!

    Enjoy

  6. 01 Feb 2005 | # Allan Odgaard wrote…

    WEill: I don’t know of alternative AS stuff, actually, I am still not entirely sure what ActionScript is :)

    With regard to colors and syntax language editor, I do intend to introduce style sheets real soon now, and provide an editor for these. For the actual syntax definitions, I haven’t fully decided what to do here, but I think they’ll stay as text, but be shown in the bundle editor similar to templates (but with styles and settings removed from these files, only few users will need to edit them, as opposed to now).

  7. 01 Feb 2005 | # Thijs van der Vossen wrote…

    Using ‘Find in project…’ makes my Mac grind down to a halt; the spinning cursor just keeps spinning and I have to use ‘Force Quit’ to shut textmate down.

  8. 01 Feb 2005 | # Will wrote…

    You post gives me a great idea.

    One could use some commands to have your XSLT sent to libxml and return the results. We could also send it to a FOP processor and return the PDF.

  9. 01 Feb 2005 | # Dominique PERETTI wrote…

    WEill : here is a great tip for actionscript 2.0 I wrote some time ago : http://macromates.com/wiki/textmate/show/Compile%20your%20actionscript%20project%20from%20TextMate.html

    Allan : congrats on this update !! the awaited-by-me HTML output is gonna be a lot of fun !!!

  10. 01 Feb 2005 | # Andre Behrens wrote…

    Upon updating to the new beta, I’ve had issues with SFTP piping. I edit in TextMate via YummyFTP, and when I hit save in TextMate, the changes aren’t going through. I was not having this issue on beta 3.

    The JavaScript parsing is welcome. However, I format my js functions thusly: 

    function foo(bar)
    {
    commands...
    }

    The folding parser, when I first loaded some JS seemed to handle this fine, however I am currently not getting these results. I am getting fold cues next to the word “function”, but no closing cue. So I tried moving the brackets to the traditional 

    function foo(bar) {
    commands...
}
    Which worked. I’m not sure why that worked and then didn’t. But I switched the syntax mode to PHP, and the folding worked correctly.

  11. 01 Feb 2005 | # Allan Odgaard wrote…

    Andre: I unfortunately broke the external editor API, I’ll release an update shortly.

  12. 01 Feb 2005 | # HazMatt wrote…

    With beta 4 I can no longer open multiple windows of files in the same project. Is this a bug? Before I could have 2 files in a project displayed side-by-side and I need that. I know that there’s a release note about opening files in a project like this. Could you add a override key or something? thanks, -HazMatt

  13. 01 Feb 2005 | # Allan Odgaard wrote…

    HazMatt: Yes, I’ll add a choice to the action menu to have a file opened in a new window. Most likely this will appear in beta 5.

  14. 02 Feb 2005 | # Bruno wrote…

    Hi Allan,

    Any way to convert HTML entities? Or any thougth incorporating it in a future release?

    Regards, B.

  15. 02 Feb 2005 | # Bruno wrote…

    LOL!!!

    I´m a dumb ass… found it on the commands! I take it back, Alan :-)

    Regards, B.

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