TextMate News

Anything vaguely related to TextMate and macOS.

Power Editing for the Mac

The TextMate book from Pragmatic Bookshelf is now shipping!

Something I know will please a lot of users is the chapter on how to create language grammars. This chapter shows, step-by-step, how to create one for JSON and goes over the various considerations.

In TextMate, creating a language grammar is not just for syntax highlight, it unlocks a plethora of context specific customizations and smart behavior, so definitely something even the casual user eventually wants to get experience with.

It’s too early for reviews, but below are a few quotes to entice you.

  • Nicholas Schlueter writes:

    This book will serve as a great reference for anyone trying to become a TextMate super star. But, more importantly this book will show basic TextMate users what they have been missing

  • Ale Muñoz writes:

    The amount of knowledge contained in the book is invaluable. It’s not only what’s written, but the ‘what-if’ attitude of the author. It encourages playing with TextMate. Effectively, the book took me from ‘TextMate User’ to ‘Official TextMate Bundle Maintainer’ in a few weeks. Such is the power of inspiration.

categories General

16 Comments

01 March 2007

by Dr Nic

I’m glad this book came out a few days after I bought a Mac and started playing with TextMate. Just the first few chapters demonstrating all the navigation, movement and select key commands made me doubly more proficient getting stuff done with TM.

Now… a chapter on how to remember them all would be handy :)

01 March 2007

by p4bl0

that’s really great !! I need to create a langage grammar but each time i try, i fail… :-p

01 March 2007

by Eelco

I just bought the PDF. Now I am going to learn how to properly update that Fortran bundle.

01 March 2007

by Patrice

About a bundle price Book/App!

01 March 2007

by Doug

Yeah, for those of use sitting on the fence (about moving from our current editor), a bundle of Textmate and the book woud be enticing!

01 March 2007

by Mystique

I’m a newbie to TextMate and got the app as part of the MacHeist bundle.. I got the book tonight at the local Barnes & Noble. I’m a long time vi user, and newbie OSX user and looking forward to learning more about using TextMate. Thank you Alan and James ;)

03 March 2007

by Robert

A bundle would have been cool.

03 March 2007

by Patrice

My credit card is ready for a bundle!

05 March 2007

by panndabea

Let the bundel begin :-D

05 March 2007

by Michael Noga

A bundle would be great, I have 11 days left on my trial and would love to get the with the book when I register the software.

07 March 2007

by Jasper

It’s a real nice book. Nicely built up going step by step. I’ve got the book since the first beta came out and i’ve happily read every chapter while it was growing. JeG does a very neat job with showing little tricks wich you can expand with you’re own tricks that you know. A must have ! (to me it was)

13 March 2007

by William J

I hope this won’t mean that no extra effort will be put in the documentation which comes with Textmate?

13 March 2007

by Allan Odgaard

William: for TextMate, I am using the reference style documentation:

Only features specific to the product is documented, i.e. you have to go outside the TextMate documentation to learn about regular expressions or shell commands, even though they play a central part in TextMate. Also, features are generally documented only in the form of “it is there, here is how to enable it” and possibly which options you can tweak. If you seek examples of how to use the feature in a workflow, you will again have to seek outside the documentation.

I do try to augment this reference style documentation with screencasts and blog posts about specific topics, but in general this is the style I am content with, because my core competence is not writing tutorial style documentation nor is it to promote knowledge which is not specific to TextMate (even when usable in TextMate).

Your comment is unclear as to whether you feel the current documentation requires improving, or if you had hoped I would branch into the latter style of documentation, now covered by a third party book.

Ideally I should hire writers like James and include their writings with TextMate, but if I do that, you should be prepared to pay a little more than €39 for the product ;)

15 March 2007

by Andrew

Allan, the TM docs are excellent, please do whatever it takes to keep the quality of them as high in future releases. I think your screencast and blog post approach to tutorials is great, and wouldn’t try to add those to the documentation proper.

07 June 2007

by Noah

I really enjoy the textmate docs, please keep them high quality and don’t let them slip like so many other apps.

08 June 2007

by Gerry

Agree, I find the docs with TextMate adequate. Spend your time on improving the software.