15 February 2007

by Fredrik

Thanks for keeping the good work up Allan. The Soryu tutorial looks real interesting. I’ve been using TextMate for some months now and it just keeps growing and growing on me. If you ask me, the 39$ i spent on TM are by far some of my best spent money of software for a long time. Can’t wait to see what 2.0 brings!

15 February 2007

by dmw

I want to love TextMate, but it’s not quite exactly what I need. What TextMate seems to excel at is writing brand-new code. Snippets are great. Being able to tab through the various fields in the inserted code really brings the code to life.

But not all of us have the luxury of being able to enter large amounts of new code. Maintenance is part of the job. What would really send TextMate over the top would be for it to somehow recognize a block of code as one matching a snippet, and reactivate the fields that existed when the snippet was originally expanded.

In the best of all possible worlds, imagine being able to select a variable and hit some kind of tab-trigger that would then let you edit in place every instance of that variable–not just by name, but by context. Now that would be cool.

I realize that this kind of interactivity with code is many orders of magnitude more difficult to achieve than what TextMate already does. The closest I’ve seen anyone come is the refactoring support in the latest versions of SlickEdit. And the fact that despite their many years of experience with editor/language integration they are still having problems putting together a flawless implementation is testament to the difficulty of the problem.

But one can dream.

16 February 2007

by Adam Salter

(disclaimer I haven’t actually tried this since I have no personal interest, just throwing this in for completeness…)

I just read recently that there is a cocoa plugin (read input manager) that allows you to do text editing in cocoa apps using vi commands…

For those pining for the vi command set, this might be just the thing to combine with Textmate for the ultimate sensitive new age text editor:http://www.corsofamily.net/jcorso/vi/

attribution:http://www.43folders.com/2007/02/05/vi-input-manager/

17 February 2007

by Jacob Rus

For those pining for the vi command set, this might be just the thing to combine with Textmate for the ultimate sensitive new age text editor.

No, you can’t use the vi input manager with textmate. And frankly, you wouldn’t really want to. They use two completely different mental models, with completely different sets of (conflicting) shortcuts, etc. “Those pining for the vi command set” should just use vi; or they should stop their “pining”, and pick up TextMate and run with it. ;)

17 February 2007

by Jacob Rus

dmw wrote:

But not all of us have the luxury of being able to enter large amounts of new code. Maintenance is part of the job. What would really send TextMate over the top would be for it to somehow recognize a block of code as one matching a snippet, and reactivate the fields that existed when the snippet was originally expanded.

If you can write your own code that recognizes such a pattern, you can easily make a command that replaces a big block of such code with a (programmatically-generated) snippet. But I can’t imagine how the editor itself is going to recognize every such pattern in every language; I can’t even think of how you’d approach such a problem. If you have ideas of how such a super-intelligent editor would work though, please share with the class. :)

In the best of all possible worlds, imagine being able to select a variable and hit some kind of tab-trigger that would then let you edit in place every instance of that variable–not just by name, but by context. Now that would be cool.

From what I can gather, something like this should be possible in the next version of TextMate. Allan has stated that he wants to allow scopes to be used for regular expression replacements.

But actually, now that I think of it, you should be able to handle something like this now. You can make a command which gets the text of the document, finds all the instances of the current word, and makes them into mirrored tab stops in a snippet. This is admittedly imperfect, and you could probably do better for a particular language (doing more complicated transformations as needed for that language’s syntax), but it should be plenty useful nonetheless.

15 August 2007

by tonyl

vi supoprt would be fantastic for textmate. vi is still the fastest way to navigate and edit text files. claiming that the “mental models” are too different and the short cut sets are conflicting, is dare i say it, just lame. the mental models have nothing to do with it, and i’m sure the developers at textmate are smart enough to figure out a vi bundle that allows proper vi key bindings while providing access to all the short cuts in textmate. one obvious solution would be to reformat the textmate short cut bindings so they don’t conflict - since textmate should support vi.

15 October 2007

by robert

I heartily agree with tonyl. vi keybindings work nicely in other editors/IDEs thanks to plugins, and there’s no mental model shift necessary.

03 December 2007

by justin b

I heartily third the motion. I’m all over the map development-wise (.NET programmer professionally, but a mac user / unix geek at heart)… I’ve found viEmu for Visual Studio to be more than adequate. I’m a big fan of textmate on the mac, but I inevitably find myself using Vim rather Textmate, even on my (macbook pro) laptop. I’m just too addicted to Command Mode. If Textmate had this feature, it would be my defacto editor.

04 February 2008

by Arnar Birgisson

Let me fourth it :) TextMate rocks but vi keybindings are conveniently stored in the muscle-memory of many of us. I’ve used TextMate since I got my mac about a year ago since vim used to suck, but now that MacVim is giving us a good vim implementation I find myself moving away from TM more often :/

19 April 2008

by Jim Tomlinson

I fifth it, if that’s possible. I’ve been really impressed with TextMate, but I just won’t use or buy an editor/IDE that doesn’t somehow support vi keybindings. (Now if I could just get vi bindings for M$ Word, I could go into management ;^)

20 April 2008

by Lloyd Moore

Textmate looks absolutely fantastic, a real time saver, but on my imac at work or macbook pro at home, it has to be macvim, for the extra productivity it offers over ‘text snippets’

23 June 2008

by Marcin

Another vote for VI key bindings. I love what TextMate can do but just can’t deal with the slow editing without VI key bindings.

08 July 2008

by Lloyd

I really think the philosophy of textmate hits the spot, but the addition of vim key bindings would make it a competition destroyer, no doubt.

07 August 2008

by Kenny

I vote for vi bindings as well please.

20 October 2008

by Michael

For what it’s worth, I surfed to this site after typing ‘“TextMate”, vi key bindings’ in Google. I think TextMate has a lot of power but I’d love to get vi keybindings on top of it as well…

01 November 2008

by Peter K.

Yes please! I too arrived here by Googling “TextMate vi key bindings bundle” I frequently find myself wishing I could zoom around a file using the good ol’ vi keystrokes permanently burned in my muscle memory…

I love TM for all it’s bundles and great integration with things like RoR but for general editing, I’m still much faster with macvim… I hope there’s some progress on this front soon!

Cheers, Peter

02 December 2008

by Ben

+1 for vi bindings…

17 December 2008

by David Hasson

Another vote for vi bindings. It’s what prevents me from buying TextMate.

25 December 2008

by andy

Another vote for vi bindings. I would not hesitate to buy TextMate if it had vi keybindings.

16 January 2009

by steve

+1 more for vi keybindings

07 February 2009

by zenshade

Wow, wonderful to see the outcry for vi keybindings. For me, too, the number one criteria for any “new” editor is will it allow standard vi command mode movements. There’s obviously a whole lot that TextMate does better than vim (else I wouldn’t even be here) and for those things you don’t need the vi way. Adapting to the TextMate way is a win. But being able to traverse a file without moving your fingers out of the home row is just an absolute no brainer.

08 February 2009

by carise

TextMate is definitely cool. However, (votes_for_vi_keybindings)++

=)

16 February 2009

by String

++VI

18 February 2009

by obviously

VI ! of course. Only reason I haven’t switched all these years.

22 February 2009

by Richard Careaga

vi. why: sometimes I think I’ve used more text editors than I’ve had beers. (Well, kegs.) All it takes is 10 seconds with it and the next thing I’ve got a string of jjjjjjjj in my textmate file. It ain’t mental, it’s physical, what the psiguys call procedural memory. It would be a great comfort in mine age to have vi keybindings in textmate, as an option, of course. Think of it as RPN for text.

01 June 2009

by asdfasdf

Ummm..

Vi keybindings?? Please.. I neeeeed them soooo bad!

18 October 2009

by Puddles

I’m picking up Mac OS development again after all these years in Windows and UNIX land, and you know what, as nice as TextMate is, I won’t use it (which implies paying for it) unless it has vi keybinding. How hard can it be to handle basic vi commands like range, search / replace, etc? For the most part they should readily map to what TextMate already offers. It’s not like we’re asking for FULL vim compatibility (no, I don’t want to play game of life inside TextMate, thank you).

11 November 2009

by Michael

Here is a limited vi keybindings for textmate: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tm-vi-plugin/

Quite a bit of vi functionality is missing: For instance, undo is not supported. apple-Z is supported so it is a bit curious that the author did not bind u to apple-Z.

11 January 2010

by Alexander Solla

I also agree that some support for Vim keybindings would be a good thing.

One very nice thing about Apple-style short cuts is that they rely on the thumb to use, over the pinky. This makes them useful and ergonomic. You just have to move your thumb over about a half inch, and you’re pressing the key.

Emacs’ meta-style is not as comfortable to me. I have to stretch my pinky in awkward way, or else move my whole hand to the arrow keys (or worse, the mouse). Which is why I chose Vim over Emacs in the first place. As MacVim (the Cocoa port of GVim) shows, it is quite possible to maintain a mix of modal and Mac-style key bindings together. Indeed, since the Vim bindings don’t typically use a meta key, there is no way for them to conflict. (I avoid using those meta key users

I would also like to see some key bindings that move the cursor from the sidebar and back without taking my hands off the keyboard.