On 20 Feb 2005, at 13:27, max@machinate.org wrote:
Maybe it would be a bit harder than I thought to make it backwards compatible. Keep thinking about it though.
The reason I asked for it in the first place is that I was making a script to insert filenames into textmate, a bit like pressing tab in terminal. Sometimes I would get more than one result, and I wanted those to appear in a list. Now I've been thinking about it though, it might be a nice thing to have this behaviour built into Textmate.
An example would be that if you typed in an html document: "href='i" and then pressed tab, you could invoke a menu which showed files matching 'i.*'. It could even be multi-dimensional as in my included mock-up.
OK, not wishing to detract, offend or anything else here other than being helpfull. Max, you can find a really nice implementation of this type of functionality is in skEdit when dealing with <img> or <a> tags. skEdit is $20 and beats both DW & BBEdit, but struggles a bit to compare with TM in some areas :)
Now on to the interesting part, where I'm thinking aloud which is not always a good thing. :) Perhaps naively, but I think much of this functionality already exists in TM, although I can't see how to control it into a functional format right now. Maybe the grand master Allan can whip something up in his magic chambers late at night ??
The required ingredients (with additions): - Go To File Chooser: (does all we would need in it's non QS way to list available files) -- need to be able to set search dir starting point: i.e. when typing "images/" we only see files in "images" dir -- have context flag: i.e. when looking for images we only want to see .jpg, .gif, .png files -- ability to invoke GTFchooser from commands with path and context flag data example: $TM_FILE_CHOOSER --path "images/" --context img -- ability to receive the output from GTFchooser in a command
- Multiple Commands Pop-up Menu (in use when commands share the same key trigger) -- ability to invoke the pop-up menu ($TM_POPUP_MENU ??) in a command and send it data -- ability to receive chosen item from pop-up menu ($TM_POPUP_MENU_CHOSEN_ITEM ??) and then process that choice to insert correct data rather than what's just displayed in the menu -- ability to display a simplified version of GTFchooser (with small scrollbar) into the menu
Add the above abilities to a command of your liking with whatever functionality you'd like and we have a form of TM pop-up menu that can enable a multitude of great things!! File look-ups or auto-completes are just two things. I hope you all can see the same picture/possibilities that I see. Apologies if you can't, sort of find it hard to explain it clearly.
Now I do not expect Allan to get this going anytime soon, but sometimes he does amaze us mere mortals with his coding skills.
Kind regards,
Mats
---- "TextMate, coding with an incredible sense of joy and ease" - www.macromates.com -