On Apr 20, 2007, at 10:59 AM, Sven Axelsson wrote:

I am a new Textmate user so I'm still figuring out how things work.

Is it really not possible to have multi-keystroke key equivalents for bundle items? With so many items available I think this would make it a lot easier to have mnemonic shortcuts that way. Sure, I can (I think, haven't actually tried it) fake this by messing with Textmates KeyBindings.dict, but that doesn't feel right.

TextMate's philosophy is that each item has a particular context in which it is to be applied. This is determined by the scope. This allows multiple items to share the same keystroke. If they operate on different scopes, there won't be any problem since only one of them will be in effect. If they operate on the same scope, you get a nice menu to chose from.

So I guess the overall point is that theoretically you should be needing many fewer different keystrokes than there are items. I suppose you could see the popup menu that shows up when there are multiple items on the same scope as a "multi-keystroke": You first select the keystroke, and then select from the menu, either by number of by first character and return. Not ideal if you are used to multi- key stroke key equivalents, but reasonably workable for items you don't use too often. For dedicated items a single keystroke not used by other items would probably be best.

Also don't forget the tab triggers as other potential ways of triggering an item.

I personally never warmed up to Emacs' multikeystrokes. But of course YMMV.

Did you have some particular bundle items in mind, or were you just commenting in general?

And of course, there is a place for submitting feature requests: http://macromates.com/ticket/

-- Sven Axelsson

Haris Skiadas Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Hanover College