Widget Creator

Andy Herbert recently announced a Widget Creator bundle (direct link to the bundle). This allows you to create a Dashboard Widget from your current document, be it a Ruby, Python, Perl, shell, or whatever script.

The created widget will then run the script when clicked and you can optionally drag files or URLs to this widget (e.g. from Finder or your web browser), and the script will receive the dropped items as arguments.

There is a screencast showing the Widget Creator bundle in action.

So if you don’t like to write contextual menu plug-ins or compile AppleScripts into applications, in order to get custom (drop) actions in Finder, this bundle provides you with an easy alternative!

Text Transformations Screencast

A month ago I asked for suggestions for an Obfuscate Selection feature in the HTML bundle. This was prompted by the desire of providing an easy out-of-the-box way for people to quickly obfuscate an email address when writing HTML.

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Open Letter to Wil Shipley

Wil Shipley wrote a great piece on his blog which unfortunately seems to have led to anger and misinterpretation.

Since what he writes rings so clear in my ears I wanted to show my support and give my interpretation of his piece below.

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Ruby Screencast (Unit Testing)

James Edward Gray shows how to apply unit tests to solving Ruby Quiz #84: Generating Pascal’s Triangle. In the process he also demonstrates a lot of features from the Ruby bundle and explains conventions and rationale behind them.

The Ruby Quiz screencast (42 MB) is almost an hour long, so you may want to grab a snack before you start it :)

Book About TextMate Announced

The Pragmatic Bookshelf has announced the availability of TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac as a beta book.

You probably already know the Prags from Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development with Rails. The author is no stranger either, as James is responsible for the TextMate Ruby bundle and has helped out with various other TextMate customizations.

Obfuscating Email Addresses

People occasionally ask how to modify the “Convert Selection to Entities” command to also convert ASCII so that they can use it as a simple email address obfuscation technique.

Because of that, we want to add an actual “Obfuscate Email Address” command, but how should it be done?

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Getting More Bundles

There are 124 bundles for TextMate where only 36 are included by default. Until recently, the way to get more bundles has been to install subversion and then do a checkout of the bundles needed (from the shell.)

Now there is a much easier way: the GetBundle bundle by Sebastian Gräßl. All you need to do is download and double click it to get an “Install Bundle” command which you can invoke from inside TextMate (hint: use ⌃⌘T and enter “install”.)

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Best Mac OS X Developer Tool

I came back from San Francisco (WWDC) a few days ago and with me I brought a silver cube stipulating that TextMate 1.5.2 won the Apple Design Award for Best Mac OS X Developer Tool 2006.

Todd Peterson took the picture shown below where I am on stage and have just received the award (click to enlarge.)

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Going to WWDC and T-Shirts

There has been a lot of requests for TextMate t-shirts so Zachary Cohen printed a bunch of these using a “for print” version of the TextMate icon (by Wolfgang Bartelme) and a nice Rich Siegel quote on the back — here is Zachary posing in the shirt.

He is going to ship them to my hotel in San Francisco so that I have something to offer in exchange for free drinks :)

This will be my first trip to both WWDC and the United States so I have two things to look forward to. I plan to be at the Webloggers Party monday night.

Search and Hyperlink Screencast

Here is a short screencast showing off the nifty bundle item selector which allows you to search bundle items.

It also shows how to initiate web searches from TextMate, easily make your text link to the result of these web searches, and shorten Amazon URLs.

Kudos to Haris for coming up with the Feeling Lucky command shown last in the screencast.

See all TextMate screencasts.

Document Palette

Long ago there was a thread about creating a new documents in the current Finder window. This turned out to be possible using OnMyCommand.

Today Rob Rix pointed me toward Document Palette which is a shareware application ($8) which is specifically made for creating new documents in the current Finder window.

This can be operated entirely from the keyboard so it appears to be a worthy replacement for the original OnMyCommand script.

Multi-stroke Key Bindings

A year ago I wrote about key bindings for switchers explaining how to make home/end and page up/down work (system wide) as most Windows users expect them to work.

Using the same key binding system we can make insertion of the various Apple-centric keyboard glyphs easy. This is useful when we want to cite a keyboard sequence like ⇧⌘V or similar.

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Elastic Tabs

Nick Gravgaard proposed a new concept called Elastic Tabs.

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Full-screen Mode via Megazoomer

Megazoomer makes windows full-screen. Just press Command-Enter, and the front-most window grows to fill your entire monitor. Press the same keys, and it shrinks again.

So for all of you who patiently wait for this to become a native feature, now there is a workaround. (Via Brad Choate and now has a thread on the mailing list.)

Snipplr — Online Sharing of Code Fragments

There is a new service which collects code fragments (I call them that to not confuse them with actual TextMate snippets.)

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Wrapping Text With Regular Expressions

I have been asked “how to wrap text” a handful of times in the last year or so, and I have needed to do it myself a couple of times as well, so here is a Ruby function which does the job:

def wrap_text(txt, col = 80)
  txt.gsub(/(.{1,#{col}})( +|$\n?)|(.{1,#{col}})/, "\\1\\3\n")
end

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Getting Things Done

One of the prevalent themes over at 43 Folders is GTD where it has its own category and there is a Getting started with “Getting Things Done” for those unfamiliar with the concept.

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Smart Folders for TextMate Projects

TextMate has the regular Open Recent menu showing you the last 25 files you opened (depending on your value of NSRecentDocumentsLimit.)

But some users prefer a menu just for their projects. Currently there is no such menu, but this is where smart folders enter the picture, and possibly Dashboard.

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Textpattern Bundle

For users of Textpattern marios has created a bundle and written an article detailing all the features of this bundle. This is an update to his previous entry.

MacDevCenter Interview

I am a week late in announcing this, but Joshua Scott Emmons did an interview with me for the O’Reilly MacDevCenter.

Thanks to Joshua for taking the time to put this together.