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I have previously mentioned that I would pick up on some of the interesting bits done by users. This is the second post in that category.
This time my favorite contribution comes from Oliver Taylor. I recently placed two of his screencasts in the TextMate screencast feed but I am mentioning his Screenwriting with TextMate bundle here as well.
The reason why this is a favorite is because it shows very creative use of scope selectors to get context sensitive behavior, but also because Oliver is not a programmer, and prior to using TextMate, he had written neither a script nor regular expression.
Talk about empowering the user! Kathy Sierra writes a lot about this in her blog. How users should learn from using the product, and how the product should help them kick ass. A recent entry about testimonials inspired me to add user quotes. I have been dismissive about such in the past, but her take on it made sense, and notice how the first quote literally use the phrase “helping me kick ass”, now how cool is that? :)
Another contribution comes in the form of a script and tip from Dr. Drang. It is about how to insert footnote-style links in Markdown documents. It shows clever use of a command to transform the document into a snippet, so that the actual link, inserted many lines below the caret, can participate in the tab-chain of the snippet.
While writing this blog entry, it was clear that something like this needs to be incorporated into the standard Markdown bundle!
Duane Johnson has updated the Rails bundle and created a screencast showing off the new features. Coincidentally it also make use of a trick similar to that of Dr. Drang, so to see it in action, watch the screencast (it was also linked to from the official TextMate screencast feed).
If you find that TextMate has too many tab triggers or key bindings then Sebastian Friedrich created a cheat sheet for the Rails bundle (PDF) and Chris McGrath created a web application to turn TextMate’s keyboard shortcut list into a PDF reference card.
Somewhat related (to cheat sheets) is an article by Alex Young titled what you absolutely must know about TextMate. I should add that you can toggle between normal and column selection from the keyboard by quickly tabbing the option (⌥) modifier key. A similar article (which I also recommend to get a feel for the features) is TextMate, by Programmers, for Efficiency Experts by Ken Collins.
