Blogging From TextMate

Here is a direct link to an 8 minute long screencast which shows what the Blogging bundle can do (30 MB.)

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Pasting Services

IRC regulars will know that you don’t paste code directly to the channel, but instead use a pasting service and post a link to where this service stores the paste.

TextMate of course has support for this, but recently this support reached new heights.

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The Enter Glyph and Human Nature

TextMate’s commit window (used by Subversion and other SCM bundles) has a commit button and a frequent question has been, if there is a way to reach that button from the keyboard.

There is, and it’s achieved by pressing the enter key. This is of course mentioned in the documentation but since few read this, I decided to add the enter glyph (⌅) to the button text.

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TextMate 1.5.2

TextMate 1.5.2 is now available for download.

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TabMate (modeline support)

Håkan Waara has written a plug-in for TextMate which add modeline support.

What is a modeline?

Ever since the first day of UNIX, text editors such as vi and emacs would insert a line at the top of text files with options specific to that file. Options include things as what language the code was written in, the size of tabs, whether to use spaces instead of tabs, et cetera.

Tutorials and Cheat Sheets

For those new to TextMate or just not intimately familiar with it yet, Soryu has written a setup tutorial which walks you through the steps of setting up your preferred tab size, theme (colors), installing the mate shell command, and gives a few details along the way, such as the fact that TextMate’s spell check as you type only will spell check your prose (and ignore keywords or markup.)

There is also a thorough basics tutorial which touches bundles (snippets, commands, etc.), various editing modes and actions, navigation, common bundles, and similar.

Since there is a lot of information to devour, David Powers has created a succinct cheat sheet (direct link to PDF) which you can print and have next to your computer. It lists key equivalents for many useful general actions.

For less language neutral cheat sheets, you can google for TextMate cheat sheets (PDF). I have previously mentioned the Rails cheat sheet and there is also one more targeted for HTML/CSS/PHP (PDF) developers (I found this from the Google search, so I do not know to whom the credit should go.)

New Ticket System

There is a new system to track bug reports and feature requests.

Before you go request anything, please do read Brent Simmons post about feature requests.

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My Wishes for an Email Application

Martin Winter asked me what I meant by “someone should write a decent mail application” so let me clarify. The Hawk Wings blog already has two dozen interviews with prominent Mac people about Mail, so this is just my point of view, not claiming to be original or anything.

I also know that I could get some of this if I used other email programs. But frankly, Mail is still the best option for me.

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Cocoa Radio Interview

I was recently interviewed by Blake Burris from CocoaRadio. If you haven’t heard about CocoaRadio before, be sure to check the archives for interesting interviews with other Mac developers. Thanks of course to Blake for taking time to do this.

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Objective-C Part 2 (Screencast)

Here is a direct link (10:39 / 11 MB) to part two of the original Objective-C snippets screencast.

This shows a few nice features found in the C and Objective-C bundles:

• documentation lookup, including following links in man pages
• reformatting objective-c method signatures
• auto-insertion of:
  • start brackets (when at the end position)
  • alloc/init/autorelease (after typing class name)
  • missing includes (based on which functions the source call)

I realize that the mouse pointer delay makes it a little hard to follow when I use the mouse to navigate menus (and documentation). The keyboard noises are also louder than on my previous screencasts. Not sure why.

HTML Screencast (Inserting Tags)

Here you have it, the first screencast to demonstrate HTML editing (8 MB).

It’s a bit short in content as it only shows how to create HTML tags (and a bit of multi-line editing towards the end), but at seven and a half minute, I figured it was best to keep it like that, and I guess tag creation is the number one productivity gain for HTML writers.

Update: Be vary of kernel panics if you pause and restart this video (see comments). Probably only a problem on Intel Macs.

Update 2: I have re-encoded the screencast as H.264 with 10fps and automatic key frame generation. I think that’s fairly standard, so hopefully no more kernel panics or crashing Quicktime. And if you wonder, yes, it’s now 306 KB larger!

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TextMate Tricks

Time for another round of links to cool stuff related to TextMate.

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Working With Numbers

Charilaos Skiadas has created a spreadsheet bundle which marks up column-formatted data and supports various functions to be run on ranges. I’m not a user of spreadsheets myself, so I probably have the terminology wrong, but there is a screencast, and it looks pretty cool!

I do however regularly have the need to do some quick ad hoc column summations and basic math, so to demonstrate how I do that, I recorded a screencast to show the math bundle in action (12 minutes, 26 MB). It also shows how to deal with column data in TextMate and a few other tidbits.

Keychain Access From Shell

I have a few scripts which need a password to complete their task. For example I have GeekTool show information extracted from a database, I create new sneakemail addresses from Quicksilver by letting a script simulate the browser session, and I have the TextMate makefile sign updates with a passphrase protected private key.

Mac OS has a keychain which is intended for storing and retrieving passwords in a secure fashion, and this service can fortunately be accessed from shell, so that is what I use for my passwords.

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Lighttpd, ProFont, Remind, Ruby, and Scopes.

What follows is a summary of some “announcements” from the last few days on the mailing list. I made peoples name link to their letter.

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Customization Screencast

Enrico Franchi asked how to cause return (↩) to also insert an asterisk when used inside block comments such as:

/* This is a block comment
 * which spans a few lines
 */

The answer can be found on the mailing list, but I also included it in the latest screencast (61.2 MB) which is really a must see for both novice and expert users.

It does a very good job at capturing how central a role language grammars play in TextMate and just how powerful that makes it!

HOWTO: Iterate Selected Files (Project Drawer)

Ken Scott wrote a command to delete files selected in the project drawer from subversion (which is now part of the Subversion bundle.)

This command makes use of the TM_SELECTED_FILES environment variable, but the contents of that variable is a little special, as it contains multiple file names, and he wanted to present these nicely.

So let us look at how to do that.

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Creating Themes

Daniel Käsmayr got the ball rolling on improving the life of custom theme developers. He outlined a theme creation tool/workflow which made me write a command to extract all scope names declared by the current language (plus all languages which can be embedded in that.)

It creates a new theme using these scope names, which can then serve as a starting point.

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HOWTO: Extract Tag Name

Niko Dittmann wrote a command to lookup the current HTML tag on http://de.selfhtml.org/ (hint: by default, pressing ⌃H on a tag name will show the W3C documentation for that tag, this also works for CSS selectors, PHP/Ruby functions, Cocoa stuff, and outside of HTML, things for which there is a manual page, etc.)

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Highlights from the List

In the interest of sharing I will try to do write-ups of the interesting stuff from the mailing list and probably also a few of the personal replies I give while providing support for TextMate.

I am starting with half a dozen letters from the last few weeks which probably fall more in the category of frequently asked questions. The upcoming write-ups will have a more “how-to” feel over them (I actually picked a dozen letters, but putting those “how-to” sections in this post made it rather long, so I will post those over the next few days).

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