On Thu, 24 May 2007, Cliff Pruitt wrote:
:-) Well, yeah I did read the _extensive_ documentation in the manual about plugins (j/k) but I was just curious if someone that had gone through the process had volunteered any "getting started" advice. For example the code browser plugin deals with the current document which means it must somehow read the documents contents. I know there are plenty of tools & ways to have Cocoa tell you what's going on, but for a beginner that's getting in a little in over my head at the moment. Maybe plugins will have to wait until I am a little further down the road with Cocoa.
Also, take a look at some of the other plugins on the Wiki page at http://macromates.com/wiki/Main/Plugins. I didn't see any source code for CodeBrowser, but some of the others offer source. TabMate, for instance, looks at the top line of the file for a magic string, then sets tab width and hard/soft tabs according to that string. It has no UI, so there shouldn't be any Cocoa voodoo to deal with. I poked at the source a little myself, but Objective-C just looks bizarre to me. I decided to wait until TM2 before getting my hands dirty with it.