On Feb 8, 2006, at 10:55 PM, Eric O'Brien wrote:
Furthermore, the way that "I" mentally "clump" functionality often is not the way it is clumped in TextMate. For example... I remember that I can do something. But is it a built-in feature, or in a macro, command or snippet? (Oh! I just noticed: apparently, the "gear" icon combines access to all three?)
I would like quicker navigation to macros/commands/snippets for the current language--optimize for the common case, but still make the uncommon possible. And from the access/use point of view, I'm not at all convinced that the macro/command distinction is useful.
I'd like the gear menu to be more like this with current language snippets/commands at the top level:
Snippet a Snippet b Snippet ... Snippet n Command a Command b Command ... Command n Other modes -> Mode -> (snippets and commands)
One keystroke or one click and you can immediately see the commands most relevant to the mode and only have to navigate up/down rather than right/left/up/down to get at what you want.
A similar optimization of elevating the current mode could be applied to the Automation menu. And put a language selection there as well since the all the stuff in that menu is so intimately tied to the language selection.
In the keyboard shortcut department, it can be confusing to browse commands/macros, take note of keyboard shortcuts only to find they do something completely different because of the language. Some shortcuts work independent of Language simply because there are no collisions, but for shortcuts that are multiply defined, it can be confusing. I'd like to see the shortcut display in the gear menu and the Automation menu filtered by the current language so that any shortcut only appears once in the whole menu structure and only for the action the shortcut will actually trigger.
For example, ^H doesn't "search on Apache.org" if my language is Objective-C, so don't show ^H as a shortcut for it when my language is Objective-C.
-john