I've been trying out TextMate to decide whether it's worth purchasing.
One thing has happened twice when writing php with it. My best guess is
that it's an encoding problem of some sort. For some reason when I
create new document in TextMate SOMETIMES php refuses to parse the
document at all, in fact even if I try inserting some test html code,
it also doesn't parse. What I end up with in the browser is an empty
page. Viewing the source reveals this to be so. I've tried reopening
the document with new encoding from the file menu... I've also reverted
to trying to convert the encoding in bbedit and yet it still doesn't
load in the browser. This only happens sometimes. Other times, there
are no problems with the php file. I've combed through the faulty files
for script errors and debugged the code thoroughly, it isn't a problem
with the code. So far I haven't been able to pinpoint what the
difference is between the files that have no problems and the faulty
ones. The ONLY solution was completely writing the exact same code in a
new document in bbedit.
I want desperately to leave bbedit for textmate, but this issue is a
major bump in the road for me. Anybody else have a similar problem? Any
suggestions? Maybe something I'm missing?
Thanks
Mike
Other comments have been made about them being non-standard. I don't
see a problem with that, they behave differently than other
implementations. My only comment is the amount of space the take up.
They really seem unnecessarily large particularly along the vertical
axis. Something more along the proportions of the items on the
bookmarks bar in Safari would be most welcome!
I agree that not having the Prefereces... command is bad, in that it's
confusing.
Having said that, I understand why it's not there.
So, to please both camps, have the Preferences... menu item launch a
help window/assistant that explains the preferences philosophy of
TextMate, along with visuals on where to find them (the specific
menus), and how the TextMate approach makes sense for what TextMate
does.
That will eliminate the number one problem encountered by new users,
and also get them quickly up to speed about TextMate's underlying
philosophy.
"Show, don't tell."
Regards,
Eric Ocean
Hello all,
It's clear that the more familiar you are with regular expressions, the
more productive you can be with TM. If you could use some additional
help (beyond what's already in the TM help), here is a site that I've
found useful:
http://www.regular-expressions.info/
I'm sure others will have some favorite regex sites/books of their own
to recommend.
Cheers,
-jeff
Well this will certainly be fixed in the upcoming version (Justin
already said so) and he pointed out what was wrong but here is how you
can easily get HTML syntax working now:
Go to:
/Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/
HTML.tmbundle/Syntaxes/html.plist
then edit lines 62 and 64 by swapping the styles and script names. It
should look like this in the end:
/*{ name = "Embedded JavaScript"; backgroundColor = "#E5E5E5"; begin
= "<(?i:script)\\>"; end = "</(?i:script)>"; },*/
{
name = "Embedded CSS"; backgroundColor = "#E5E5E5"; begin =
"<(?i:style)\\>"; end = "</(?i:style)>";
patterns = (
{ include = "CSS"; }
);
},
Later,
Eric Curtis
Is there a way to do incremental search in Textmate, where the display
scrolls to the closest match as you're typing in the search term, ala
"Quick Search" in BBEdit or Ctrl-S in Emacs?
Ben
When you have a block of text like this:
<ul>
<li><a {if $section eq "orders-pending"}class="current" {/if}
href="/admin.php/orders-pending">Pending Orders</a></li>
<li><a {if $section eq "orders-pending"}class="current" {/if}
href="/admin.php/orders">Search Orders</a></li>
</ul>
the </ul> doesn't register as a closing tag because it is not at the
same tab level as the <ul>. In other words, the above doesn't work, but
this does:
<ul>
<li><a {if $section eq "orders-pending"}class="current" {/if}
href="/admin.php/orders-pending">Pending Orders</a></li>
<li><a {if $section eq "orders-pending"}class="current" {/if}
href="/admin.php/orders">Search Orders</a></li>
</ul>
James.
Hi
First of all, TextMate is great work. I only had to try it out for a
few seconds and it was instantly obvious to me that TextMate just
_feels_ great to use. It's powerful yet doesn't feel clunky or
bloated, unlike some other editors which shall not be named.
The only thing missing for me to be able to use it in my day-to-day
work is the possibility to have projects synchronize with an
ftp-server. I'm a web developer, and most of the time I work against a
remote ftp-server (not always, but quite often).
The only editor I've found that does this in a simple fashion is
Dreamweaver MX, which, while not terrible as a code editor, it isn't
exactly optimal either.
I hope ftp-support is added soon, not just being able to edit a remote
file, but actually being able to associate a project with an ftp
account. Because, then I'd have no reason to use Dreamweaver MX again,
instead of using it all the damn time.
Best regards,
Tomas Jogin, Sweden
http://jogin.com/weblog/
I've got a rough cut at python support bundle[1]. It includes syntax
and three snippets: klass, def and deff. The snippets rely on a de
facto python standard of 4-spaces for indentation. I'll keep making
minor updates, but feel free to use it in the future TextMate releases.
The editor is rather neat so far. Keep up the good work.
[1] http://glyf.org/TextMate/pythonsyntax.tgz
---
Philip f
Greetings,
(this was cc-ed to feedback(a)macromates.com and contains screenshot
attachments, which I hope the ML server won't strip out).
A little background first: I'm a long time BBEdit user, I think that
it's a great product but I also think that it really starts to show its
age. It really looks like the BareBones guys are trapped in the
technology they used from day 1 and that if they'd want to get fresh,
they'd have to restart from scratch, which they probably won't. That's
why TextMate looks promising, and because it's built on top of modern
technologies it has the potential to become really great.
However, this v1.0 looks like nothing more than a good draft to me.
Yeah, shoot me, but that's David's hyping machine fault... :p
So here's a first batch of random comments about my first impressions.
They are mostly cosmetic and usability related, since I didn't really
used the product a lot yet, but I'm pretty sure I'll have some more as
time goes by.
- Ok so, I'm one of those who was very surprised not to find a
preferences dialog. When you think about configurability, you usually
think about preferences. I just saw a post about this on the MacroMates
blog, so let's just avoid this subject right now.
- Now let's go straight to the GUI itself. Here's a screenshot of a
TextMate default window (with my own default background color):
What I see here:
+ The color contrast between the gutter and the text area is pretty
low so the distinction is hard.
+ The gutter can only have 4 digits line numbers (no, files larger
than 9999 line are not that rare).
+ The (orange) wrap column line is almost invisible.
+ The lower status bar has loads of useless empty space.
+ The empty corner at the intersection of the scroll bar looks, well,
empty.
Here's my (photoshop) take on this:
+ A simple gray line to separate the gutter from the text area.
+ The gutter is a bit larger to allow 5 digits line numbers.
+ The outside limit of the wrap line is drawn in the same color than
the text area but with a lower brightness (that's currently how BBEdit
8 does it, it looks really nice imho).
+ The status bar is collapsed and put at the same level than the
horizontal scroll bar, saving lots of empty space. The left indicator
is the current line number, the right indicator is the column number
(again, that's how BBEdit does it, but they do it for a good reason).
Small icons could be added to make this more obvious.
+ No more weird empty corners.
Doesn't this look much tidy and cleaner like that ?
Let's move on to the project window. Here's how a basic project
currently looks in TextMate:
What we have here:
+ Weird looking tabs. They're not even tabs actually, and they really
look like they're quick hacks to me.
+ Weirdly sized icons in the drawer list.
+ (same comments than above for the text window itself).
Here's my take on this:
+ Tabs looking like tabs (actually stolen from NetNewsWire and
resized a bit).
+ Smaller icons in the drawer list allowing for a more balanced look
(quite impressive to see what a couple more pixel space can do uh ?).
+ Folder name is bold.
+ (same modifications than above to the text window).
Let's move on to features:
- Find and replace feature:
+ There should be a "Use selection for replace" menu shortcut.
+ There should be a "Replace" menu shortcut.
+ There should be a "Replace all" menu shortcut.
+ There should be a "Replace and find next" menu shortcut.
All these would allow to perform basic search & replace operations
straight from the keyboard, *without* having to open the find panel at
all.
- I guess that you guys already know that and are already preparing
something to fix this problem, but I'll say it anyway: having to
manually go and edit plist files from the guts of the app to have some
decent colors (relax, I'm kidding, I just don't like thos ugly black
backgrounds) is ridiculous. Tell me you're working on something before
I start my own Cocoa 'tmbundle' editor.
- Something which I found pretty weird: each tmbundle defines its very
own color settings right ? So if I want to have the same background
color for *all* languages I have to change *all* tmbundle syntax files,
right ? Wouldn't it be much simpler to have "default" settings which
each tmbundle would inherit from and could then override or not ? So
just like CSS elements can inherit from their parents, a syntax file
could either inherit attributes from the defaults, or override with its
own values. That would greatly simplify the whole coloring settings I
think. Thoughts ?
- Another pretty obvious one: there is no "function popup", or any
other way to quickly navigate through the list of functions or methods
of a code file, or the structure of a markup file.
- Snippets are great, but the snippet menu is already pretty crowded. I
think that allowing snippets to be grouped in families (based on the
tmbundle they're coming from, to begin with) or categories or whatever,
could help minimize the clutter. Ditto for macros and commands.
- How about the ability to have the snippets, macros and commands in a
palette ?
- How about giving some basic abilities to a command to specify when it
is actually applicable ? A command menu item (or palette entry ;))
could then be disabled if it is not. For example, the "Compile" command
does not make sense for a '.html' file, or the "Reload in Safari"
command does not really make sense for a '.rb' file.
- Being able to write commands in something else than shell scripts
could be cool. Like, being able to directly write applescript instead
of having to go through 'osascript' commands.
- Hey, you seem to have pretty good text editing widget (that
OakTextView thingy), so why not also use it for command editing ? Heck,
why not even also use it for colored regexp editing in the find panel ?
- Detail: it seems like a lots of ATSUI related debug messages are
still being sent to the console.
- Snippets, macros and commands are good ways to automate a lot of
stuff, but are there any plans to allow TextMate plugins, for those
tasks which would require an elaborate GUI ?
Oh, and one final comment: I *R*E*A*L*L*Y* *H*A*T*E* the icon. It's
butt ugly. Really. Heck, you have John 'Magic' Marstall on the mailing
list, I'm pretty sure he could do something about this :))
--
Luc Heinrich - lucsky(a)mac.com - http://www.honk-honk.com
