Watts and Jenny wrote:
What things is [QuickCursor] lacking, do you think?
As I recall, Edit in TextMate used to let us flip back and forth between a window in an application and the one linked to it in TM. With QuickCursor, multiple edits lead to multiple windows saved in TM. Thus QuickCursor is not very helpful for editing long documents.
QuickCursor has two other drawbacks when compared to the "hackish" Edit in Textmate:
1. You can't leave your TextMate window open and still save to the original application via QuickCursor; in fact AFAICT you have to close the TextMate window to save at all. That prevents you from keeping a text copy of your (say) Web form or email message--so you lose everything if your application's connection or login times out.
2. QuickCursor seems to lose all formatting from the original context. This is a real bummer when replying to email messages with multiple quote levels. For example, the text beginning my message turns from a threaded reply to the following unintelligible block:
________________Begin QuickCursor version________________ Watts and Jenny wrote: What things is [QuickCursor] lacking, do you think? As I recall, Edit in TextMate used to let us flip back and forth between a window in an application and the one linked to it in TM. With QuickCursor, multiple edits lead to multiple windows saved in TM. Thus QuickCursor is not very helpful for editing long documents. QuickCursor has two other drawbacks when compared to the "hackish" Edit in Textmate... ________________End QuickCursor version________________
:(
On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 7:12 PM, Jon Ippolito jippolito@maine.edu wrote:
- QuickCursor seems to lose all formatting from the original context. This
is a real bummer when replying to email messages with multiple quote levels. For example, the text beginning my message turns from a threaded reply to the following unintelligible block:
It works just fine if you use ">" to indicate quote levels, rather than whatever you're using.
Jon Ippolito wrote:
*Watts and Jenny wrote:*
- You can't leave your TextMate window open and still save to the
original application via QuickCursor; in fact AFAICT you have to close the TextMate window to save at all. That prevents you from keeping a text copy of your (say) Web form or email message--so you lose everything if your application's connection or login times out.
That's half true, in my experience. You have to close the TextMate window to go back to the original application, but your document is saved to the clipboard, so it shouldn't actually be lost.
Ironically, this was a problem I had with the original "Edit in TextMate," because I tended to *assume* the save was going to take in the other program and closed the TextMate window before checking. (Yes, this is operator error, not a TextMate bug, per se.) I got in the habit of turning anything that's taking more than a few minutes to write into an actual standalone document and just using conventional cut and paste. I'm aware that defeats the purpose of "Edit in TextMate," of course, but I very rarely lose text. :)
- QuickCursor seems to lose all formatting from the original context.
This is a real bummer when replying to email messages with multiple quote levels. For example, the text beginning my message turns from a threaded reply to the following unintelligible block:
Interesting; I'm editing this mail this way now and it worked just fine. My suspicion is that it may have to do with the format of the mail: TextMate's input manager may handle converting "rich text" mail to plain text better than QuickCursor does, or perhaps QuickCursor doesn't explicitly request a plain text version if both are available on the clipboard. (My mail client is set to only display the plain text version.)
When I described the original Edit in TextMate as a hack, it's not because it's bad; it's because I'm *fairly* sure it's doing stuff that Input Managers aren't technically designed to do, which puts it at risk of being broken by changes to the operating system in a way that QuickCursor (to my understanding) isn't.
On 20 May 2011, at 02:54, Watts Martin wrote:
[…] Ironically, this was a problem I had with the original "Edit in TextMate," because I tended to *assume* the save was going to take in the other program and closed the TextMate window before checking. […]
Saving should send back the text — the link between the app and TextMate is not robust though, so certain things can break it.
- QuickCursor seems to lose all formatting from the original context. […]
Interesting; I'm editing this mail this way now and it worked just fine. My suspicion is that it may have to do with the format of the mail: TextMate's input manager may handle converting "rich text" mail to plain text better than QuickCursor does, or perhaps QuickCursor doesn't explicitly request a plain text version if both are available on the clipboard. (My mail client is set to only display the plain text version.)
I went to great lengths “decoding” Mail’s use of HTML for quotes etc. to make it work when sent as text. This isn’t really possible w/o injecting code into Mail.
When I described the original Edit in TextMate as a hack, it's not because it's bad; it's because I'm *fairly* sure it's doing stuff that Input Managers aren't technically designed to do, which puts it at risk of being broken by changes to the operating system in a way that QuickCursor (to my understanding) isn't.
It certainly is a hack — that’s part of the reason why we made it F/OSS and officially does not support it ;)
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Allan Odgaard -
Jon Ippolito -
TjL -
Watts Martin