How about this as a solution for preferences:
1. Move all of the preferences off the menus and into a separate
(command-, invoked!) window.
2. Add a toolbar and allow most of the preference options to be added
to it via the "customize..." option.
This would allow users to make frequently changed preferences easily
available, and it seems to be the method that a few other apps have
chosen.
And now for some feature requests:
1. Allow projects to define their own variables in the same way that you
can with the defaults command line tool. This would be useful when
setting up templates and snippets.
2. Add a separate "New" sub-menu, which bundles can contribute to, I see
this working like the existing templates feature, but with parameters
in a similar to snippets. Probably need to have the parameters
configured in the property list that would go with the template file.
2a. An alternative to this would be to allow template property lists to
specify a series of parameters that would be prompter for in a
dialog
before the file is created. E.g.
{
parameter = "1";
displayName = "Class Name";
defaultValue = "MyClass";
}
3. A minor UI tweak: have the encoding and line endings embedded in the
status bar, this could either be a read-only display, or a combo-box
to alter them.
4. Add a preference/option to show or hide white space characters
(e.g. line endings, tabs, etc.).
What do people think?
Yours,
Ian.
#ifndef __COMMON_SENSE__ | Ian Phillips
#include <std_disclaimer> | http://ianp.org
#endif
I'm not sure if I'm using it right, but the quote auto completion seems
to slow me down, as most of the time you need to add something after a
quote, but I'm required to use the right arrow key to move over a
character to go past the quote, which is a rather long distance compared
to the quote key.
Is there some trick I don't know about?
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On 6.10.2004, space aliens observed Sune Foldager saying:
>Good, argumentative reasons for it, please! :-).
For me, it went something like this:
"OK, now I want to change the background color of this window. That must
be in Preferences. Uhm. No preferences in the app menu. Must be burried
somewhere. Probably in Edit. Nope. Maybe in Window? Nah. Okay, so I'll
go through each menu. Oh, Color Settings. Okay, but that only works with
syntax highlighting disabled. That must mean that there are more
settings somewhere else. I guess I just missed the Preferences. They
*must* be in the app menu. Argh. Okay, "TextMate Help". What, you mean I
can't change this?"
Had all settings been inside a Preferences dialog, it would have been
clear what the user can change and what he can't right from the
beginning.
Having preferences inside the menu has additional problems. It clutters
the menu with things you use seldomly, which makes things you use more
often (like actual commands) harder to find. And it makes it harder to
find preferences, because it's often not clear where a given preference
should go, and if you can't find it, you can't be sure whether you just
missed it or whether it simply doesn't exist at all. A preferences
window also gives you room for additional information about settings.
BTW, what the heck is "Freehanded edit"?
lucas
- --
"Afer all, who needs courage when you have a gun?"
-- Prof Hubert Farnsworth
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I have been waiting for a good and affordable text editor to come
along for OS X. I come from the Windows world and used UltraEdit
there. The one thing I really like about TextMate is the Tabbed
interface much like other MDI like editors such UltraEdit and IntelliJ
IDEA, especially the re-ording of tabs. I just wish that TextMate
offered this tabbing without having to create a project or even a
scratch project. It would be really neat if TextMate just opening up
in scratch project mode. Is possible in the current version?
Other than that and some more syntax highlighting, it's a great piece
of work! You are to be commended! First editor I have used on OS X
that felt "right".
Patrick
Small thingie: I think it would be very convenient if after entering all
the parameters in the snippet, the tab key would place the cursor at the
end of the snippet.
Example:
ahref\thttp://somewhere.com/\tsomewhere\t results in
<a href="http://somewhere.com/">somewhere</a>CURSOR instead of
<a href="http://somewhere.com/">somewhere CURSOR</a>
:)
BTW: I'm starting to enjoy this editor very much...! :)
--
Joost Schuttelaar
Any plans for XHTML/CSS code hinting?
And what about browser previews other than the built in safari
rendering?
Also, can we just have the project drawer show up by default. There's
hardly ever an instance where I wouldn't need/want it in view.
-t
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On 6.10.2004, space aliens observed drew saying:
>I keep my dock quite small, and the icon just looks like a nasty
>brown blur.
Yeah, the problem with the icon isn't that it's ugly (I really don't
care either way), but that you can't easily recognize it if it's bellow
a certain size, which it is in my dock. That's what's great about
BBEdit's icon. It may not be pretty, but I always see it immediately
because it's unique.
lucas
- --
"The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just."
-- Abraham Lincoln
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On 6.10.2004, space aliens observed Justin French saying:
>>The main feature I use in BBEdit is the excellent CSS support. I can
>>easily create new CSS rules and find out what the correct syntax is.
>>Having something similar in TextMate would be great.
>All the CSS properties (font-size, width, height, etc) are all in
>there as keywords, as are all the units (px, em, etc). Agreed, most
>of the values (bold, underline, block) are not in there yet, and TM
>has no idea if "left" is a valid value for "float", but I don't think
>BBEdit knows this either...
It does, though :-)
Here's how BBEdit work. If I have something like this:
.foo {
}
I move the cursor between the two brackets and hit Cmd-M. This gives me
a list of properties. I select one. This gives me something like this:
.foo
{
border-color: ;
}
Then I hit Cmd-Opt-M, and now I get a list of possible values for this
property along with related properties.
HTML tags work the same. This helps since
- I only ever use tags that are valid in the scope that I am in
- I always know what tags/properties I can use and how to spell them
- I always know what values are allowed
I'm not sure if something along those lines is planned for TextMate
since it may not be as much targeted at HTML as BBEdit is, but it would
certainly be very nice to have something like this, maybe even more
automatic, for example with dropdown lists of legal
functions/tags/properties/values/... automatically appearing while
typing.
lucas
- --
"I hate words."
"Words suck."
"If I wanted to read, I'd go to school."
-- Beavis & Butthead
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This is something I've longed for but have never seen it in any text
editor yet: the ability to simply select markup tags and/or their
enclosed contents. Most editors follow the selection logic of word >
line, which IMO is rarely useful in working with code.
What I'd like is an assortment of modifier-clicks (command-click,
option-click, command-shift-click, option-shift-click, etc.) that
perform the following:
(when the pointer is inside a tag)
- single-click selection of the current, single tag
- single-click selection of the current tag, its corresponding
opening/closing tag, and everything in between
(when the pointer is between two tags)
- single-click selection of everything between the two most immediate
tags (and excluding the tags themselves), with perhaps additional
clicks casting wider and wider inter-tag selections (going from
<td>[selection]</td> to <tr>[<td>selection</td>]</tr>, for example)
Some items (like the <div> tag in HTML syntax mode) are already being
treated as collapsible objects now, but there's no way (AFAIK) to grab
such an object and move it around without carefully selecting the whole
thing character-to-character. This seems like a needless restriction to
me.
Hope that's helpful.
John
Looks like things are calming down a little so I thought I'd chime in
with my TM experiences. I used it all day today for hacking on a Rails
app and here are my thoughts. I've avoided putting in nits that I've
seen addressed already, though it's possible I've missed seeing some,
please forgive me if there are duplicates :) My editing background is
that I'm a hardcore vim user and I quite dislike using the mouse while
editing.
Issues
* Renaming a group is kind of a pain, can it default to being ready to
edit when you click to make a new group?
* A language nitpick, the message on the group info window ... "What
did you expect to find here? ..." I dunno, seems a little
unfriendly?
* There seem to be some pretty annoying issues with the whole tree in
the drawer collapsing without my telling it to do so. For example,
have a group with folders in it, do the info on that folder to change
the regex, then when the changes get applied *poof* the tree
collapses. It has also collapsed at random times when I've switched
back to the desktop TM was on, though I cannot consistently reproduce
this, it just happens whenever.
* Any way to undo more than one character at a time? This is arduous,
though it may be difficult to implement without modes (ala vim).
* Dragging things around in the tree seems to be more painful than it
should. I'm not sure why, but I was trying to drag a folder such
that it would be below (but not nested in) another folder and I
couldn't get it to go. I became frustrated and deleted the reference
and re-added the folder. Anybody else experience this, or is it just
me?
Feature Requests
* Completions drawn from all open files, please?
* Auto un-dent things like (in Ruby) else, end, closing braces, etc?
The major issue for me is the collapsing of the tree that is going on.
Other than that this thing is pretty sexy. I enjoy the organization it
provides me and I look forward to the next release after this flood of
feedback you have recieved from the users. I'm confident that it will
be quite nice.
Thanks
-Scott