I've been using TextMate for years and I'm productive and happy with it. However, I like to try other editors from time to time to see if I'm missing anything. Recently I spent some time learning Vim and I discovered a few things that I particularly liked.
1) Split windows -- not the kind of split windows you normally get in Mac applications, but the Vim style ones. In Vim you can easily navigate from the keyboard to your different splits and choose what files to display in each. Additionally, you don't have to reach for your mouse to create a split. When you split, Vim divides the space up for you which is what you want most of the time. I found that it is very handy when needing to view more than 1 file at a time, which in my case is most of the time. Closing splits is about as easy as they are to create -- all from the keyboard. Multiple windows isn't really the same thing because they are slow to setup and tear down.
2) Selective multifile grep -- in Vim you can use a regular expression to open a set of files, and then just grep across the open files.
3) Don't need arrow keys -- after years of editing with the mouse; I find it painful to reach for it. It hurts my right shoulder and shoulder blade. It even hurts to have to move my hand down to the arrow keys. However, in Vim it is easy to keep your hands resting on your keyboard with your shoulders relaxed. No reaching for the mouse or arrow keys.
On 3 Nov 2010, at 04:56, Martin Hess wrote:
- Don't need arrow keys -- after years of editing with the mouse; I find it painful to reach for it. It hurts my right shoulder and shoulder blade. It even hurts to have to move my hand down to the arrow keys. However, in Vim it is easy to keep your hands resting on your keyboard with your shoulders relaxed. No reaching for the mouse or arrow keys.
Many of the emacs key bindings are supported so, for example:
control f moves cursor forward one character control b moves cursor backward one character control n moves cursor down one line control p moves cursor up one line
These are standard in all mac text fields as well as TextMate. No cursor keys are needed and they also work with the shift to select, etc..
Dave.
Thank you for the tip, but is there a way to reassign those to something else?
On Nov 3, 2010, at 1:43 AM, Dave Baldwin wrote:
On 3 Nov 2010, at 04:56, Martin Hess wrote:
- Don't need arrow keys -- after years of editing with the mouse; I find it painful to reach for it. It hurts my right shoulder and shoulder blade. It even hurts to have to move my hand down to the arrow keys. However, in Vim it is easy to keep your hands resting on your keyboard with your shoulders relaxed. No reaching for the mouse or arrow keys.
Many of the emacs key bindings are supported so, for example:
control f moves cursor forward one character control b moves cursor backward one character control n moves cursor down one line control p moves cursor up one line
These are standard in all mac text fields as well as TextMate. No cursor keys are needed and they also work with the shift to select, etc..
Dave.
textmate mailing list textmate@lists.macromates.com http://lists.macromates.com/listinfo/textmate
El 03/11/2010, a las 15:53, Martin Hess escribió:
Thank you for the tip, but is there a way to reassign those to something else?
You might be interested in these articles:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060317045211408 http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.html
-- Juande Santander Vela Applied Scientist, Archive Management Group Archive Department, Data Management & Operations Division European Southern Observatory (Germany)
William Blake: Las aves tienen su nido, las arañas su tela, y los hombres... la amistad.
^p, and ^n are nice for navigating lists, but it ^ isn't a comfortable way to navigate on a frequent basis. It would be nice to have a keyboard navigation mode in TM that didn't require a meta key.
On Nov 3, 2010, at 8:07 AM, Juande Santander Vela wrote:
El 03/11/2010, a las 15:53, Martin Hess escribió:
Thank you for the tip, but is there a way to reassign those to something else?
You might be interested in these articles:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060317045211408 http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/Cocoa%20Text%20System.html
-- Juande Santander Vela Applied Scientist, Archive Management Group Archive Department, Data Management & Operations Division European Southern Observatory (Germany)
William Blake: Las aves tienen su nido, las arañas su tela, y los hombres... la amistad.
textmate mailing list textmate@lists.macromates.com http://lists.macromates.com/listinfo/textmate
On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Martin Hess martinhess@me.com wrote:
^p, and ^n are nice for navigating lists, but it ^ isn't a comfortable way
to navigate on a frequent basis. It would be nice to have a keyboard navigation mode in TM that didn't require a meta key.
I sincerely think you are better off finding ways to emulate the features of TextMate you like in MacVim than you are waiting for the ability to emulate the features of MacVim you like to appear in TextMate. Modal operation would almost certainly have to be a post-2.0 feature, and... well.
For my own Vim use, I use the Project plugin (which I'm not entirely happy with, but I don't like the other alternatives any better), PeepCode's "PeepOpen" to emulate TM's quick file switching, FuzzyFinder to bring comparable switching between buffers, SnipMate for snippets explicitly modeled after TM, and TagList for the equivalent of a function navigation popup.
Thanks for the vim plugin list. I knew about some of them but not all.
On Nov 4, 2010, at 1:17 PM, Watts Martin wrote:
On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Martin Hess martinhess@me.com wrote:
^p, and ^n are nice for navigating lists, but it ^ isn't a comfortable way to navigate on a frequent basis. It would be nice to have a keyboard navigation mode in TM that didn't require a meta key. I sincerely think you are better off finding ways to emulate the features of TextMate you like in MacVim than you are waiting for the ability to emulate the features of MacVim you like to appear in TextMate. Modal operation would almost certainly have to be a post-2.0 feature, and... well.
For my own Vim use, I use the Project plugin (which I'm not entirely happy with, but I don't like the other alternatives any better), PeepCode's "PeepOpen" to emulate TM's quick file switching, FuzzyFinder to bring comparable switching between buffers, SnipMate for snippets explicitly modeled after TM, and TagList for the equivalent of a function navigation popup.
textmate mailing list textmate@lists.macromates.com http://lists.macromates.com/listinfo/textmate
As a long-time VIM-er, I confess it is hard to switch to a tool like TextMate or Emacs. I haven't played much with the split screens in VIM. As for regex/grep; you can get that with other command line tools. That may require more CLI wizardry than you prefer.
And I have to agree about navigating via the keyboard. CTRL+key does not compare. Last night I had a document I thought I could pound out real quick, and VIM'd it. It ended up being a major sorting/editing effort, which I was able to do quickly via VIM.
I could probably have been just as proficient with TextMate key bindings; but I've not learned them yet. And, to be fair, I have a decade of dedicated, professional VIM use. So, it's like driving or eating.
What I like about TextMate is it's meta behaviors. How it handles spell check, the project view on the right side. I tried using Scrivener to work on my novel, but found TextMate fit my style. (I used VIM for my last novel...)
On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 12:56 AM, Martin Hess martinhess@me.com wrote:
I've been using TextMate for years and I'm productive and happy with it. However, I like to try other editors from time to time to see if I'm missing anything. Recently I spent some time learning Vim and I discovered a few things that I particularly liked.
Split windows -- not the kind of split windows you normally get in Mac applications, but the Vim style ones. In Vim you can easily navigate from the keyboard to your different splits and choose what files to display in each. Additionally, you don't have to reach for your mouse to create a split. When you split, Vim divides the space up for you which is what you want most of the time. I found that it is very handy when needing to view more than 1 file at a time, which in my case is most of the time. Closing splits is about as easy as they are to create -- all from the keyboard. Multiple windows isn't really the same thing because they are slow to setup and tear down.
Selective multifile grep -- in Vim you can use a regular expression to open a set of files, and then just grep across the open files.
Don't need arrow keys -- after years of editing with the mouse; I find it painful to reach for it. It hurts my right shoulder and shoulder blade. It even hurts to have to move my hand down to the arrow keys. However, in Vim it is easy to keep your hands resting on your keyboard with your shoulders relaxed. No reaching for the mouse or arrow keys.
textmate mailing list textmate@lists.macromates.com http://lists.macromates.com/listinfo/textmate
On Nov 3, 2010, at 12:56 AM, Martin Hess wrote:
- Selective multifile grep -- in Vim you can use a regular expression to open a set of files, and then just grep across the open files.
I've never used that feature in Vim, but you could probably achieve something similar using the `mate` command (depending on your shell's regex support). There's also something from Red Sweater that lets you select by regex in the Finder (at which point you could open the selection with TextMate and have a project with only those files).
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Ben Wilson -
Dave Baldwin -
Juande Santander Vela -
Martin Hess -
Rob McBroom -
Watts Martin