Updating a Bundle

TextMate includes three dozen default bundles. These are automatically updated when you get an update to TextMate, so you generally do not want to do a checkout of these manually, unless you want to contribute to a bundle.

There are no planned updates to TextMate while I am on vacation but a swarm of volunteers will still update the bundles, so you may want to make an exception to this rule, for the next few months.

You can follow the instructions in the manual, but this will leave you with a bundle that eclipses the default version, and so, you will have to either a) remove it when you update TextMate, or b) keep svn up the bundle, to keep it updated.

This might not sound like a big deal, and it generally is not, but if there is just the slightest chance you will forget to update or remove the bundle, another option exists: overwrite the bundle included with TextMate.

To do this, you can do a regular checkout as described in the manual, but instead of doing it to /Library, do it to /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles.

So imagine we want to replace the Python bundle with the latest version, we would do:

# to get proper encoding for svn
export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

# remove old bundle
cd /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles
rm -rf Python.tmbundle

# export latest version
svn export http://svn.textmate.org/trunk/Bundles/Python.tmbundle

I use export instead of checkout as that won’t create the .svn folders, and thus will likely be slightly faster and occupy less disk space. But the downside is that you can’t do svn up at a later time, you need to re-export it.

Some related readings:

General