[TxMt] Very nice

[Allan Odgaard]

On 10/11/2005, at 12.12, Andreas Wahlin wrote:

> It's a great thing, problem is though, it's somewhat slow (I  
> suppose there's nothing to do about that) but when I constantly  
> press an arrow key, it never updates.

It updates 1.5 seconds after last “change”. But it'll be instant for  
non-mutating changes (when I add a cache for the extracted list of  
symbols).

> I'd like to see encoding down there in the status bar as well, I  
> don't really know why actually, but all other editors have it :)

See Erics recent reference to Hyatts “all other modern browsers” :)

There are two reasons why I don't want to put it there, despite it  
being oft requested:

  1) people should use utf-8, especially with TM's tight shell  
integration, this is important because the commands that need to work  
on files (like svn diff, TODO, PyMate/RubyMate (showing script  
output) etc.) can't possibly know about encodings, and utf-8 is the  
only encoding which can be recognized with near certainty, and is the  
only encoding which is ASCII compatible and can represent all  
typeable characters.

  2) changing the encoding in TM is done _when saving_ -- that is,  
TextMate uses unicode internally, but offers the capability to  
*convert* this when saving the buffer, thus that choice should be  
made in the save dialog (i.e. if I were to offer it in the status  
bar, the proper thing to do would then also be to disallow typing of  
characters not supported by the current encoding, but I really do not  
feel like this, when utf-8 is the silver bullet, has been recommended  
by IETF etc. for 7+ years, the iso-8859 people/committee I think have  
stated that they no longer work on that set of encodings because of  
utf-8 etc.).

The faster we phase out all legacy encodings, the better -- and I'm  
playing an active role trying to promote utf-8 (despite this not  
always being popular)!