I've now spent a couple of weekends writing code with TextMate, which
is I
think enough time to understand its way of working. Some of the things
I like
most about it come from the language syntax bundles, which are really
powerful and flexible. That's a great feature and a real selling point.
Typing close characters for me: nice. Auto-completion: nice. C++ class
templates: nice. I like the spare look, no stinkin' toolbars cluttering
stuff up and distracting from my all-important data.
Love the new tab look in b7. (Maybe a tad darker to set them off more
from their background? Eh, maybe not.) Also love the sharp new approach
to drawing the selection. Much more readable!
Inevitably, I have suggestions. Users, they're so annoying that way!
Most of my suggestions have to do with searching. TextMate doesn't feel
quite right, yet.
(I've scanned a bunch of the previous messages to the list, but not
enough to be sure these weren't discussed already. Apologies if I'm
repeating the past.)
- Keyboard accelerator for "replace and find next". For the love
of god, Montresor!
- "Find the selection" action, with keyboard accelerator. (Yes, it can
be macroed, but why should I have to macro such an important action?)
- Scroll the text to keep the cursor in the "hot zone" when possible.
E.g., if you have to scroll to make the result of a search visible,
scroll enough to put the new selection in the middle of the screen.
Repeated find-nexts though large files always seem to end up for me
with the selection on the bottom-most line, with no context visible.
Yuck!
- For extra points, place the selection where it won't be hidden by
the Find dialog, which is often covering up the text. (But you're
going
to add a replace-and-find-next accelerator, so the Find dialog won't
be shown so often and this won't matter as much. Right?)
- Bigger fields in the find/replace dialog, please! Try copying some
text that spans multiple lines and pasting that into the find field.
Hard to deal with, yes?
- Whole word matching option, please, controlled by a checkbox on the
find
dialog. I often want this without wanting the bother of writing a
regular expression every time.
- Multi-file search outside of project groups, please! Minimal
implementation searches all the files in a particular directory with
optional descent into subdirectories. This is a switch-blocker for me,
and I bet it would make lots of other people happy.
More controversially:
You're probably sick of hearing this, but please reconsider adding
an app preferences dialog. It will do two things for you:
- It will clear out rarely-changed items that are currently
cluttering your menus.
- It will make clear which preferences are app-wide, and which
ones are settings for the current document.
- Bonus: your app will feel more Mac-like than it does now.
Remember, it does me no good to have easy access to stuff I set once,
then never ever change again.
As I think about that suggestion and fiddle with things, I begin to
realize
that TextMate doesn't have per-document settings, and that the
appearance of
having them is a bug. For instance, open two documents. Turn on text
wrapping
in one. Note that only the selected document at the time you change the
setting is affected. This leads you to believe that wrapping is a
document
setting. But if you quit TextMate and restart, suddenly all documents
are
getting text-wrapped. Whoops.
I would suggest that some choices should be saved with the document, as
part
of its state (cursor position, selection, wrap, font choice, etc). Those
settings belong in menus. Consider making anything you expect the user
to
change often part of the document state. Any setting that affects all
documents probably belongs in a preference dialog, tucked out of the
way.
I can argue this the other way, that adding document state is more
trouble than it's worth. BBEdit does it, and I like it. Soft line wrap
in
particular is something that I definitely want on some documents and
definitely don't want on others. Worth thinking about, anyway.
Boy, I got longwinded. Hope at least some of this is helpful.
Thanks for making such a solid editor, and hope you enjoy that new G5!
--ceej
hi,
sorry to say that but new tabs doesn't pop to the eye like the old
ones...with the old ones the selected one was instantly seen because it
was blue....
what's your opinion about that?
olivier
Hi there,
My fingers are itching to get the latest beta, as everyone raves
about, but I can't seem to download it. TM itself says "Remote file or
URL was invalid" when checking from within the app, and I can't
contact the macromates website either.
Could some kind soul make 1.01b7 available somewhere, pretty please?
Oh, and Allan et al. TM is the first editor I ever paid for (been
using a mix of vim, SEE, and Smultron so far).
Cheers,
Jonas
A few more suggestions on minor issues:
- Chunk up undo actions. E.g., undo shouldn't undo a bunch of typing
by single letters, but instead by the whole typing episode.
- When I'm selecting big ranges of text, and I've moved the mouse to
or beyond the top or bottom of the page, scroll to reveal more text
and extend the selection.
- Selecting lines is funky with lines that consist of only a newline.
For instance, triple-click to select a line that's part of a block,
then sweep the cursor down. The selection will "stick" above the first
blank line, then snap down to grab that and the first non-empty line
as
you sweep downward. What if I want to grab a block with its trailing
whitespace and move the whole thing? I can't.
- Tiny bug: To reproduce this, cut or delete some selected text, then
undo the cut. The restored text is selected, good. Now move the cursor
with an arrow key: doesn't move as expected! It seems to be offsetting
from the middle of the selection, instead of from the bounds. This
happens
if you make a selection and copy it, as well.
--ceej
TM 1.0.1 B7 (which I just downloaded) feels really nice. The new tabs
I'm experimenting with feel and look nice, the added preferences are
great, and everything just feels a lot more refined.
SO MANY of the "gripes" and "deal breakers" mentioned on this list have
been nailed by Allan, and the app feels much better for it.
Applause.
Justin
Here's an idea (stolen from BBEdit):
A dialog of some sort that appears when running long shell scripts would be
very useful, I have one that runs a compiler, which can take several minutes
and I might want to cancel it rather than wait for the script to timeout.
Chris
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To what extent is TM applescriptable?
Is it at least possible to somehow replicate this chunk of script re TM?
tell application "BBEdit"
set theSelection to the contents of selection
end tell
I'm wanting to use TM with the PHP Function Index from artis:
http://www.artissoftware.com/phpfi/
bongoman
Is it possible to get more encodings in the "Open with encoding..." entry
in the menu please? The system's list is pretty long (maybe too long) but
having at least Latin9 (ISO-8859-15) would be nice for us Europeans :-)
Thanks,
--
Ollivier ROBERT -=- FreeBSD: The Power to Serve! -=- roberto(a)keltia.freenix.fr
Darwin snuadh.freenix.org Kernel Version 7.5.0: Wed May 12 16:58:24 PDT 2004
Hello,
When reindenting code, I usually doubleclick on the whitespace to the
left on the first word on the line. I'm expecting the whitespace only
to get highlighted, TextMate highlights all the whitespace and the
first word. Very annoying!
//johan
