[TxMt] for perl development

[Noah M.Daniels]

Textmate is looking awesome (I just tried it Friday for the first time) 
and though I own a copy of BBEdit, I think I may switch. But there are 
a couple of things still missing, IMHO.

First, the Perl syntax bundle doesn't handle POD (=begin, =cut, etc.) 
yet. I very quickly hacked in support for simply =begin and =cut as 
block comments, but it would be ideal if it could do as good a job as 
BBEdit's syntax coloring for Perl/POD.

Second, I do miss BBEdit's integration of certain things in its script 
menu - 'find in reference' (really just shelling out of perldoc -f) and 
'view POD' (just shelling out of perldoc), as well as the ability to 
execute in the debugger. It would be nice to be able to, within a 
project, execute things like 'perl -d <filename>' and such - or for a 
C/C++ program, run it in gdb. I realize this can be done in Textmate 
using the Automation->Commands menu, so perhaps what I'm saying is that 
a few more built-ins would be nice :)

Finally, for the syntax bundles, the non-uniformity of color schemes 
between bundles (I routinely work in projects involving Perl and C 
code) could stand to be improved - ideally, a way to graphically change 
the colors for the syntax bundles would be nice, too, rather than 
editing the bundles. For example, rather than specifying the RGB values 
in each syntax plist, have an indirect color code - for example, 
"keyword" or "comment" - and then in TextMate have a preference that 
allows you to specify colors for all of those, globally.

Anyways, TextMate is looking great. Keep up the good work!

--
"Failure is not an option, it comes bundled with the software" -DefCon 
10
Noah M. Daniels
ndaniels at mac.com