Hello,
First thanks to Allan for all the great work on TextMate ^o^.
Sorry if any of you in the mailing list do not like long mails. If you do not want to read it, just jump to the next mail in you mail box ;-) And sorry for putting so many things in one mail, but one mail is easier to skip or remove than 3 or 4 ;-)
So there are my list of remarks about TextMate. They do not mean that I do not like them program. On the contrary, I just want it to be even better ^o^. Feel free to criticize any of them (except the first one).
First, I do not really care if the preferences are in there own dialog box or in the menus. In the menus, it has the advantage of being faster to change. But with the feature list that will certainly grow in the future, some things will certainly have to be put in a separate dialog box. (And no, do not reply to this paragraph, as it has already become a troll on this mailing list ;-))
'Re-open with encoding' is great but the encodings list is quite short. UTF-32 is not even there. If someone works a little with Japanese text, he will need Shift-JIS and EUC-JP. Someone with Chinese text might want Big5. Even a westerner wanting to use the euro symbol might want ISO-8859-15. The best would be to be able to add or remove encodings in the list. The same thing would be great in the 'Save' dialog (the list should be the same in both places and be editable at both places). And adding it in the 'Open' dialog would be great too.
Little bug : if we select 'other' in the View->Tabs Size menu, nothing happens. There should be a dialog box asking for the number of spaces you want.
An other little problem I have is the drawing of CJK characters. These characters are wider than latin characters and as they are drawn today in TextMate, a character may overlap with the previous and next one. In terminals, this is generally handled by making them double-width. In SubEthaEdit, it is quite strange as they are not fixed size at all, some are larger than others. If you want any screenshot, example, just ask. Note that I am in no way good in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, I just made a few Ruby scripts to help me train my Japanese, and they do include some Japanese characters.
For the ligatures problem, if it has not been corrected in the sources yet, it's quite easy to correct: If you want ATSUI not to use common english ligatures (fi, fl): ATSUFontFeatureType type = kLigaturesType; ATSUFontFeatureType selector = kCommonLigaturesOffSelector; ATSUSetFontFeatures(myATSUStyle, 1, &type, &selector); and if you do not want any type of ligature: ATSUFontFeatureType types[9] = { kLigaturesType, kLigaturesType, kLigaturesType, kLigaturesType, kLigaturesType, kLigaturesType, kLigaturesType, kLigaturesType, kLigaturesType }; ATSUFontFeatureType selectors[9] = { kRequiredLigaturesOffSelector, kCommonLigaturesOffSelector, kRareLigaturesOffSelector, kLogosOffSelector, kRebusPicturesOffSelector, kDiphthongLigaturesOffSelector, kSquaredLigaturesOffSelector, kAbbrevSquaredLigaturesOffSelector, kSymbolLigaturesOffSelector }; ATSUSetFontFeatures(myATSUStyle, 9, types, selectors); Some info there : http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/ ATSUI_Concepts/atsui_app_features/chapter_9_section_15.html (be careful, the feature selector names on this web page are not all good) It will also disable ligatures for Hindi or Arabic script, but as TextMate's goal is not seem to be a multi-lingual editor... (but it would be great if it could at least manage the CJK characters well ;-))
Last thing: having a direct link to http://lists.macromates.com/mailman/listinfo or at least to the archives of the mailing list (http://one.textdrive.com/pipermail/textmate/) on TextMate's web page would really be great. I only found it after subscribing to the mailing list, in the mail asking for confirmation.
Cheers, Vincent Isambart