Allan,
Here's a suggestion that came to me this morning. How about applying the wonderful logic in the file chooser to commands and macros? I was thinking of it being very much like Quicksilver for TextMate commands.
I love it that the number of Bundles for TextMate is growing so quickly! What I don't like is that there is very little structure to the allocation of keyboard shortcuts. Its very quickly becoming emacs-like in the number of option-command-control-foo key-combos one must remember. I know they are all there in the menu system, but I prefer to not use the mouse very much when I'm writing and programming.
One thing I always like about emacs, was that I could type Meta-x and type in the the beginning of a command, hit space for auto-complete, maybe a couple more characters, and I would have the command I was looking for. I used this technique for a whole host of commands that I used fairly often, but not often enough to remember the keyboard shortcut. I think you could easily go one better by applying your matching algorithm to macros and commands. Another thing that I liked was that emacs was self-teaching in that it would often tell me the keystroke needed to activate the command I just typed, so that after seeing it a bunch of times I would just start to remember.
Brad
Brad Miller, PhD Assistant Professor Luther College http://www.cs.luther.edu/~bmiller jabber: bnmnetp@jabber.org
On Feb 6, 2005, at 20:07, Brad Miller wrote:
Here's a suggestion that came to me this morning. How about applying the wonderful logic in the file chooser to commands and macros? I was thinking of it being very much like Quicksilver for TextMate commands.
Ah yes -- but how is this best done? intermixed with files? only Command/Snippet/Macro intermixed with files and these give a 'submenu' (i.e. arrow right change the content)? And should each submenu show all items (maybe with the bundle as prefix)?
On Feb 7, 2005, at 10:44 AM, Allan Odgaard wrote:
On Feb 6, 2005, at 20:07, Brad Miller wrote:
Here's a suggestion that came to me this morning. How about applying the wonderful logic in the file chooser to commands and macros? I was thinking of it being very much like Quicksilver for TextMate commands.
Ah yes -- but how is this best done? intermixed with files? only Command/Snippet/Macro intermixed with files and these give a 'submenu' (i.e. arrow right change the content)? And should each submenu show all items (maybe with the bundle as prefix)?
When I was thinking about this, I was thinking of it as a completely separate from files. So command-T to use the file chooser, and command-M to use the command chooser (for example). The idea is one easily accessible keystroke that lets me search commands. I'm not even sure you would want to include snippets would you?
I think the same interface used for files could display the closest matching,/only matching command (along with the bundle it comes from and the pre-programmed keystroke) I would also have it only show commands from bundles that are enabled.
I'm imagining that you would type enough keystrokes that a short flat display would show you all the matches, so you would not need any hierarchical submenus. QS, for example, guesses right 95% of the time, and 99% of the time the thing I want is in the top four or five items on the list of possibilities.
Brad
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
Brad Miller, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Computer Science Luther College http://www.cs.luther.edu/~bmiller
On Feb 7, 2005, at 10:44 AM, Allan Odgaard wrote:
On Feb 6, 2005, at 20:07, Brad Miller wrote:
Here's a suggestion that came to me this morning. How about applying the wonderful logic in the file chooser to commands and macros? I was thinking of it being very much like Quicksilver for TextMate commands.
Ah yes -- but how is this best done? intermixed with files? only Command/Snippet/Macro intermixed with files and these give a 'submenu' (i.e. arrow right change the content)? And should each submenu show all items (maybe with the bundle as prefix)?
I like the idea too ...
perhaps best would be a separate launch window for each "domain", one for Commands, one for Snippets, Macros, File Choosing, etc. They would each have their own key commands for invocation. I'm not sure about the sub-grouping of commands/snippets, but what does File Chooser do about identical filenames in separate project directories? (I obviously haven't played with the beta too much). Perhaps, descending into subdirectories of snippets/commands won't be an issue if File Chooser already handles duplicate name conflicts gracefully.
k
On 7. feb 2005, at 22:18, kumar mcmillan wrote:
On Feb 7, 2005, at 10:44 AM, Allan Odgaard wrote:
On Feb 6, 2005, at 20:07, Brad Miller wrote:
Here's a suggestion that came to me this morning. How about applying the wonderful logic in the file chooser to commands and macros? I was thinking of it being very much like Quicksilver for TextMate commands.
Ah yes -- but how is this best done? intermixed with files? only Command/Snippet/Macro intermixed with files and these give a 'submenu' (i.e. arrow right change the content)? And should each submenu show all items (maybe with the bundle as prefix)?
I like the idea too ... perhaps best would be a separate launch window for each "domain", one for Commands, one for Snippets, Macros, File Choosing, etc.
Only problem is that the concept of snippet tends to run together with the concept of command, since the latter can return as snippets. I think macro/command/snippet should be unified here.
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Allan Odgaard -
Brad Miller -
kumar mcmillan -
Sune Foldager