[TxMt] Re: Possible additional Touchbar icons

[Allan Odgaard]

On 15 May 2020, at 22:18, Graham Heath wrote:

> Just thinking out loud here:
>
> What about that thing some editors do where they put a new tip on new 
> documents? Anything to improve discoverability of these sorts of 
> features.

TextMate 1 actually had a “tip of the day” which some have said they 
missed (I did it back then to compensate for lack of a manual).

For keyboard shortcuts though, I think the aim should be to have them 
present somewhere, not as “tips”, for example if you open the pop-up 
menus in the Find window, you see several convenient keys, like the 
“in” pop-up menu show ⌘F / ⇧⌘F to toggle between 
document/folder search, ⌘[ for [back in] “recent places”, ⌘↑ 
for “enclosing folder”, and the action pop-up show ⌥⌘1 to 
collapse/expand all results (same shortcut as collapsing foldings), 
⌘1-⌘n to jump to the n’th file in folder search results, and the 
Edit → Find menu show the keys for toggling find options, and ⌥⌘F 
for “Find All” (using that with a document search will show all 
results in the find dialog’s list view).

Though currently there is still lack of discoverability in how to use 
some of the features, for example the “Copy Matching Parts” can be 
extremely useful, but I reckon many users are probably unaware of it, 
and doing regular expression searches allow some pretty powerful 
replacements with TextMate’s replacement format string (which allow 
substitutions in matched parts), or when it is useful to use ⌘E with 
multiple selections before doing a search, etc.

But for this, I think we need screencasts to show workflows, not just 
put up a tip.

So what I have been thinking about is to re-introduce the tip of the 
day, but with embedded videos.

Right now though my focus is elsewhere, but (lack of) discoverability is 
definitely on my mind, as I do think many users are missing a lot of 
powerful features / workflows, especially with stuff “hidden” away 
in the bundles.

On that note, while I have never been satisfied with the bundle editor 
of TextMate 2, it has recently become obvious to me that it affects my 
own motivation to fix/improve bundle items: This definitely needs to 
improve.