On Feb 20, 2007, at 5:21 AM, Chris Insinger wrote:

I'm new to TM and trying to implement a Command that fills the current selection with a character. Right now I have a simple program that replaces every character in the current selection with a space character (but skips CR/LF), so far so good. [snip] Ideally I'd like to:

1. select an area of text
2. press ^F (or whatever)
3. get a character from the keyboard
4. use that character to fill the selection

How do I accomplish #3 above?

Others may have better ideas, but I think Step 3 is best done by inserting your command as a snippet. Here's a Perl script that seems to work.

#!/usr/bin/env perl @lines = split /\n/, $ENV{'TM_SELECTED_TEXT'}; until ($line = shift @lines) { print "\n"; } print '${1:x}' . ('$1' x (length($line)-1)); foreach $line (@lines) { print "\n" . ('$1' x length($line)); } print '$0';

The until loop handles an edge case where the first lines of the selection are empty. I would not be surprised to learn of other edge cases that I've missed.

Make this a new command, set the input to Selected Text or Nothing and the output to Insert as Snippet, and choose whatever Key Equivalent you like. To use it, select the text you want to change and press the Key Equivalent. Each selected character will change to "x," and the first will be selected. Enter the character you want to change it to, and they will all change. Press the Tab key to move the caret to the end of the original selection.

I've read that Perl "knows" what kind of line ending your system is using and automatically adjusts the effective value of "\n" to match that. I have no experience with that feature, but that should make this work for CRLF line endings as well as LF line endings.

-- Dr. Drang