PROBLEM: The feature of all mac apps that I use the most is search. Specifically find selection & find again. I use that feature to step through every instance of that selection throughout my code. One feature that I would love to see is a back button for selections.
Every time you do a search or scroll through your document & select something, to get back to the last thing you were working on you have to have set a bookmark & remember which bookmark you were last looking at, or you have to manually find that place in your code again.
I work on other peoples old janky ASP 'classic' and quickly slapped together ASP.NET code on a deadline. Anything to help me make quick work of navigating through the (massive mountain of fetid spaghetti) code the better.
SOLUTION: If there was a way for the program to note every time you move the selection more than 'a little bit' & log that information sequentially, all you'd have to do to get back to what you were last looking at would be to hit the back button. bam bam... done, no thinking.
I know the system is extremely extensible, i'm sure there is some way for me to 'roll my own' system for doing something similar. (1) I'd need a command to get the current input location row & column (2) log that information somewhere (3) a command to get the last input location from 'wherever' and then (4) a command to set the input location to 'that location'
??? I think i could figure all this out with applescript and bbedit, but i'm still rather green when it comes to hard-core UNIX hacking. Anyone have any suggestions? ??
IDEA: Maybe a quickie version of it would be to undo the last edit, which would take me back to the last place I was, but then redo my last action without moving the input location so I don't lost any work. hmm...
Maybe there's another solution to my problems that i haven't considered. What does everyone else do?
I am hoping that the upcoming API will allow me to write a plugin that does something like that.
I am coming from jEdit. For jEdit I wrote a plugin that would keep a stack of last visited/edited locations, optionally displayed in a window with a few lines of context. One could either travel up/down that stack to 'go back where you were before', or click on the display to go to that location. In addition this plugin would cooperate with ctags for a live display the definition(s) of any word under the cursor if found in ctags.
A second plugin I wrote called CodeBrowser used ctags to display a live window with all functions/declarations/classes/whatever, optionally sorted.
Combined these plugins allowed for very fast navigation through alien or complex code.
I am really looking forward to the API hoping I can write similar plugins for TM. I miss those features much and still often go back to jEdit. jEdit also still has folding capabilities that work much better for me. But I have confidence that TM will get there soon, and being a native program has many advantages over a Java program like jEdit.
Gerd
On Mon, Aug 22, at 12:03 AM, thomas Aylott wrote:
PROBLEM: The feature of all mac apps that I use the most is search. Specifically find selection & find again. I use that feature to step through every instance of that selection throughout my code. One feature that I would love to see is a back button for selections.
Every time you do a search or scroll through your document & select something, to get back to the last thing you were working on you have to have set a bookmark & remember which bookmark you were last looking at, or you have to manually find that place in your code again.
I work on other peoples old janky ASP 'classic' and quickly slapped together ASP.NET code on a deadline. Anything to help me make quick work of navigating through the (massive mountain of fetid spaghetti) code the better.
SOLUTION: If there was a way for the program to note every time you move the selection more than 'a little bit' & log that information sequentially, all you'd have to do to get back to what you were last looking at would be to hit the back button. bam bam... done, no thinking.
I know the system is extremely extensible, i'm sure there is some way for me to 'roll my own' system for doing something similar. (1) I'd need a command to get the current input location row & column (2) log that information somewhere (3) a command to get the last input location from 'wherever' and then (4) a command to set the input location to 'that location'
??? I think i could figure all this out with applescript and bbedit, but i'm still rather green when it comes to hard-core UNIX hacking. Anyone have any suggestions? ??
IDEA: Maybe a quickie version of it would be to undo the last edit, which would take me back to the last place I was, but then redo my last action without moving the input location so I don't lost any work. hmm...
Maybe there's another solution to my problems that i haven't considered. What does everyone else do? ______________________________________________________________________ For new threads USE THIS: textmate@lists.macromates.com (threading gets destroyed and the universe will collapse if you don't) http://lists.macromates.com/mailman/listinfo/textmate
On 22/08/2005, at 18.39, Gerd Knops wrote:
PROBLEM: The feature of all mac apps that I use the most is search. Specifically find selection & find again. I use that feature to step through every instance of that selection throughout my code. One feature that I would love to see is a back button for selections.
I am hoping that the upcoming API will allow me to write a plugin that does something like that. [...]
Just to add my comments: personally I use a combination of scroll (w/ o moving the caret -- which is ctrl-cmd-option arrow keys) and cmd-J to return, bookmarks, or the undo/redo trick -- but Gerd's approach does sound like a more elegant/universal solution, so I'd of course be happy to listen to his API requests (when I find time to do the initial plugin infrastructure -- which starts to look like an intermediate 1.1.1 release, perhaps with 1.1.2 doing syntax HL for printing, and then on to 1.2).
Allan Odgaard <allan@...> writes:
On 22/08/2005, at 18.39, Gerd Knops wrote:
PROBLEM: The feature of all mac apps that I use the most is search. Specifically find selection & find again. I use that feature to step through every instance of that selection throughout my code. One feature that I would love to see is a back button for selections.
I am hoping that the upcoming API will allow me to write a plugin that does something like that. [...]
Just to add my comments: personally I use a combination of scroll (w/ o moving the caret -- which is ctrl-cmd-option arrow keys) and cmd-J to return, bookmarks, or the undo/redo trick -- but Gerd's approach does sound like a more elegant/universal solution, so I'd of course be happy to listen to his API requests (when I find time to do the initial plugin infrastructure -- which starts to look like an intermediate 1.1.1 release, perhaps with 1.1.2 doing syntax HL for printing, and then on to 1.2).
It's been five months and I just wanted to follow up and see where Allan stands with this feature request. I'm not so much looking for the API, rather a full fledged forward/back button on the UI, but if Allan can provide a suitable API and someone else can write a bundle or something that'd be peachy. In summary I'd value a forward/back button similar to the browser's, that would allow me to return from "expeditions" in my large/complex list of files.
As an aside, I find that the way I use TextMate (for RoR development) is that I drag my project folder to the TextMate app icon. I navigate solely via the "drawer" and command-t "go to file". I have no use for the tabs across the top of the window because the number of open files quickly overflows the horizontal space. It is often the case though that I'm jumping from a controller, to a model, to a stylesheet, to a layout, to a unit test, to a functional test -- and I want to get back e.g. to the controller when I'm done! With say five or six directories expanded in the drawer, the controller file (at the top of the drawer) isn't visible (cuz I'm at the bottom of the drawer in the functional tests area) -- so I have to use the mouse to scroll the drawer and then select the controller. This would be a lot faster with a "back button".
Another aside -- LOVE TextMate :)
On 24/1/2006, at 15:55, Bill Burcham wrote:
It's been five months and I just wanted to follow up and see where Allan stands with this feature request [...]
It's unlikely part of the next milestone -- the to-do is too big to do any real future planning, other than group features into modules and have a rough idea about in which order the modules should be executed -- but many “minor” features do not get placed in a module.
-
Allan Odgaard -
Allan Odgaard -
Bill Burcham -
Gerd Knops -
thomas Aylott