TextMate News

Anything vaguely related to TextMate and macOS.

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.

General

15 Comments

31 January 2005

by Ben Jackson

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

31 January 2005

by Allan Odgaard

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.

01 February 2005

by Ben Jackson

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.

01 February 2005

by WEill

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!

01 February 2005

by Will

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

01 February 2005

by Allan Odgaard

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).

01 February 2005

by Thijs van der Vossen

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.

01 February 2005

by Will

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.

01 February 2005

by Dominique PERETTI

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 !!!

01 February 2005

by Andre Behrens

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.

01 February 2005

by Allan Odgaard

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

01 February 2005

by HazMatt

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

01 February 2005

by Allan Odgaard

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.

01 February 2005

by Bruno

Hi Allan,

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

Regards,
B.

01 February 2005

by Bruno

LOL!!!

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