I love textmate to death and use it exclusively for all my development since its release.
The only area where I wish for some improvement is the file management. Most of my work is in projects which contain hundreds of files and folders so this limits the tab bars usefulness quite a bit. It seems to be easier for me to start several textmate instances one pointing to different logical parts of the application.
The first and bigger proposal is to bring intelligent file opening to textmate. This works much like quicksilver. A hotkey opens a edit window and an attached dropdown window specializes itself more and more as you type. A simple search would be "user" which would offer you all files with the word user in them. A more complex example would be typing "usrg" with would find USeR_Gateway.rb, USeRGlobals so on. I recommending installing quicksilver for a demonstration of the paradigm. Its great emerging technology and would be a great competitive advantage to have natively in TM. The same code could later be used to jumping to methods within a file.
Another proposal would be introduction of intelligent tab fading. During inactivity the least recently used tabs start to fade out and close themselves after a while. This happens slower when there is lots of space in the tab bar and faster the more items there are. This would be great to cut the tab clutter and get rid of files automatically with which you are done. Currently i'm finding myself using close all windows all the time.
On Jan 21, 2005, at 7:39, Tobias Luetke wrote:
The first and bigger proposal is to bring intelligent file opening to textmate. This works much like quicksilver. [...]
You must be new here ;)
http://lists.macromates.com/pipermail/textmate/2005-January/002340.html
[...] The same code could later be used to jumping to methods within a file.
Ah, that's a very nice touch (I'll add it to the to-do)!
Another proposal would be introduction of intelligent tab fading [...]
I'll need to have the idea rest in my brain for some time before I can really judge whether or not I think it has merit. As of such I'm not opposed to it, it sounds neat, but it conflicts with my reluctance toward hard to predict automated behavior, especially when the behavior includes making items disappear -- but I'll keep it in mind!
On 21/01/2005, at 5:39 PM, Tobias Luetke wrote:
The first and bigger proposal is to bring intelligent file opening to textmate. This works much like quicksilver. A hotkey opens a edit window and an attached dropdown window specializes itself more and more as you type. A simple search would be "user" which would offer you all files with the word user in them. A more complex example would be typing "usrg" with would find USeR_Gateway.rb, USeRGlobals so on. I recommending installing quicksilver for a demonstration of the paradigm. Its great emerging technology and would be a great competitive advantage to have natively in TM. The same code could later be used to jumping to methods within a file.
Actually, this already exists in my current private beta version (which I think Allan is releasing in the next day). Just hit Command-T and enjoy :) Allan posted something about this earlier today, so search the archives :)
Another proposal would be introduction of intelligent tab fading. During inactivity the least recently used tabs start to fade out and close themselves after a while. This happens slower when there is lots of space in the tab bar and faster the more items there are. This would be great to cut the tab clutter and get rid of files automatically with which you are done. Currently i'm finding myself using close all windows all the time.
This sounds like a *really* good idea. I'm going to bug Allan on AIM every day until he does this :)
--- Justin French, Indent.com.au justin.french@indent.com.au Web Application Development & Graphic Design
On 21/01/2005, at 6:07 PM, Justin French wrote:
This sounds like a *really* good idea. I'm going to bug Allan on AIM every day until he does this :)
Actually, I've talked to Allan about it, and I'm not 100% sure anymore... needless to say it's cool, but it's a kinda of "mysterious" behaviour which could take a lot of people by surprise.
--- Justin French, Indent.com.au justin.french@indent.com.au Web Application Development & Graphic Design
On 21/01/2005, at 6:07 PM, Justin French wrote:
This sounds like a *really* good idea. I'm going to bug Allan on AIM every day until he does this :)
Actually, I've talked to Allan about it, and I'm not 100% sure anymore... needless to say it's cool, but it's a kinda of "mysterious" behaviour which could take a lot of people by surprise.
I thought the same thing. Maybe if it was a preference that was off by default?
- Justin
On Jan 22, 2005, at 17:22, Justin Blake wrote:
[ having unused tabs fade away ]
I thought the same thing. Maybe if it was a preference that was off by default?
Another problem is to define 'inactive tabs', e.g. what if you browse documentation for 10 minutes?
However, the idea has merits. For example instead of closing inactive tabs, they could maybe be zoomed down to take up close to no space and e.g. expand (smoothly) on mouse hovering or similar...
But I think I'll try the Safari-like behavior before any of this ;) this and the new file chooser should give a quite good way to deal with files IMHO.
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Allan Odgaard -
Jon Raphaelson -
Justin Blake -
Justin French -
Tobias Luetke