1. I have appended a shell script that launches TM and allows piped input. I did not write the script; in fact, I merely found it in my ~/bin directory and thought that it came with the standard TM install. The -c option lets you create a new file.

It does lack the crucial 'don't quit until editing is done' feature. Here are three kludges I can think of to get that feature. Given a -wait flag:

a. add a block at the end of the script that creates a $TM_FILE.lock in the same directory and checks every N seconds for the .lock file. When it's gone, quit the script. Then create a command that saves current file and deletes the .lock file. Finally, write a little macro that saves, closes the window and runs the 'delete .lock' command.

In a future version of TM that triggers scripts/commands on events, one can avoid the command and macro, and have 'Close Window' trigger the deletion of the lock file.

b. have the shell script loop and check for changes to the modification date on the file. Unfortunately, that means it will quit on the first save. But you don't need any fiddling with macros and commands.

c. call the Textmate Service from a (different) shell script. The TM Service definitely blocks whatever app calls it. In other contexts this might be a bug, but here it's great. However, I don't know how to pipe text to a Cocoa Service from the command line. This may be rather hard. Any ideas?

- Eric

--- #!/bin/sh

# Originally written by Rick Gardner (rick.gardner@mac.com) # and Kevin Ballard (kevin@sb.org) # Modified to work with TextMate by Andrew Ellis aellis@gmx.net # 10-11-2004

OPEN="open -a TextMate" CREATE="touch" USAGE="usage: tm [-ch] filename [filename ...]"

CREATE_FILE=0 while getopts ch FLAG; do case $FLAG in c) CREATE_FILE=1;; h|?) echo $USAGE; exit 1;; esac done

shift $(($OPTIND - 1))

# are we dealing with a filename or are we using stdin? if (( $# == 0 )); then if [ ! -t 0 ]; then exec 6<&0 exec 7>&1 prefix=/tmp/tm suffix=$(date +%s) # The "+%s" option to 'date' is GNU-specific. filename=$prefix.$suffix $CREATE $filename exec > $filename

while read a1 do echo $a1 done open -a TextMate.app $filename exec 0<&6 6<&- exec 1<&7 7<&- else if [ ! -z ${1} ]; then $CREATE ${1} $OPEN ${1} else $OPEN fi fi else # iterate over the files for filename; do # create the file if requested if (( $CREATE_FILE )); then if [[ -f $filename ]]; then echo "File `$filename' already exists." fi $CREATE $filename fi if [[ -e $filename ]]; then # now also opens directories $OPEN "$filename" else echo "File `$filename' does not exist." fi done fi