On 2008-Sep-29, at 8:10 AM, Karl-Heinz Wild wrote:
AFAIK it is possible the insert ^L to force the printer to start with a new page - in plain text files.
But how can I insert this characters (control) with textmate.
I had a similar question about two years ago and didn't get much of an answer. I actually just solved this problem (for my purposes) last week. There are a few ways to represent things like ⌃L without literally typing it, but it really depends on what will be interpreting the character.
In my case (an init script for `tcsh`), I was able to replace all of the control characters with something like \033 for Escape, \007 for Bell, etc. To represent ⌃L, I could type \014. Finally, I can edit `.tcshrc` in TextMate. Sheesh.
I've been told that you can represent these characters in `bash` with something like $'\cL' (for ⌃L).
Finally, the Cocoa text system allows these characters to be typed by preceding them with ⌃Q. This works like ⌃V in the Terminal, so you would type ⌃Q⌃L to insert the Form feed. Unfortunately, this doesn't work in TextMate's editor window because ⌃Q is used for something else. It might work in TextMate's Find dialog or bundle editor (since the text controls there are closer to the default NSTextView), so you could type things there then copy them and paste them into the editor window, but that's a bit cumbersome. You could also type such things in TextEdit, then copy and paste back, but again, cumbersome. Another problem with using TextMate for this is that you can't really see what you've typed… er, I guess I should say "pasted". All of these characters are invisible and the "Show Invisibles" command represents them all with the same diamond character. I hate to say it, but if you need to deal with literal control characters in a file, you should probably use something in the Terminal, like Vim.
For a list of codes, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII