Hi -

New to TextMate and this list and very impressed so far with both.

I am experimenting with extending existing Language Grammars, and I've run into a problem. I wonder if this is my problem or not, or simply a problem in understanding the system:

It appears that some pattern definitions override or erase others. For instance, I've added a feature to grab a reference to a particular email in Mail.app and create a tag called "emaillink" in my GTDalt document. Specifically, I want to add these emaillinks to the notes fields in my GTDalt document (I mention this as it becomes important below). I decided to make a new Language Grammar, based on GTDalt, and wrote the following:

{ scopeName = 'text.gtdalt.jb'; fileTypes = ( 'gtd', 'gtdlog' ); foldingStartMarker = '^\s*project'; foldingStopMarker = '^\s*end\s*$'; patterns = ( { name = 'meta.jb'; match = '\bmy_emailllnk_tag\b'; }, { include = 'text.gtdalt'; }, ); }

Seems like it should work, but it doesn't. This appears to be because the definition of the notes field (in the text.gtdalt Language Grammar) erases my scope tag.

I see this, too, when I try to extend the C Language Grammar to include color markup of the API I am using. In many cases, wherever the text was in Scope source.c, it works. But as soon as the term in question appears within a function declaration or a similar parsed structure, my scope tag is eliminated in favor of the parsed one. The position of the "include" line doesn't appear to make a difference.

It seems like there should be a way to have persistent scope tags, for exactly this purpose -- color-coding particular terms or rendering particular strings a certain way, potentially regardless of local context. But if not, could someone suggest a workaround?

Thanks very much jb