On 8 Oct 2013, at 12:53, Ross Ahmed wrote:
I think the number of keystrokes could be reduced however, by for example making a column selection then inserting numbers. Or is this asking too much?!
TextMate 1.x did work fine with column selections filtered through commands, unfortunately this is not yet handled gracefully in 2.0 and your email was a reminder that I need to finish that part.
On the general subject, I’ve been considering introducing something like a counting variable to use in the replacement (format) string, e.g. ${iota[:«start»[:«step»]]} which would insert a number starting with the optional “«start»” value and incrementing by “«step»” each time inserted.
Though this wouldn’t allow inserting the same number twice (as in your example). Another approach would be allow “math expression” so that one could replace with $((i += 1)) which would inesrt the value of $i and then increment it by one. But even this is not overly flexible, yet fairly complex (i.e. no-one would probably use it).
I am leaning toward the counting variable, and will probably add that when I find a good way to implement it and/or refactor the relevant code. Until then, a user could simply insert the literal $iota string (via find/relace) and then have a command post-process the document to insert seqeunce numbers for these.