[TxMt] three small feature requests

[Allan Odgaard]

On Dec 30, 2004, at 23:28, Eric Hsu wrote:

> 1. Allow undo from find/replace dialog. Lots of times I enter in the 
> wrong regular expression and the find/replace goes badly. I want to 
> hit apple-Z and Undo it and fire up another search, but instead I have 
> to switch to the text window.

hmm... so undo should fall through to the main window? currently I 
could do that, but if I introduce a multi-line mode for the 
find/replace strings it would probably be natural for these to also 
have undo/redo, which would then clash!?!

> 2. It would be great if the new ( :) ) txmt: resource locator allows 
> us to load things like txmt://a.pdf, which would then get loaded into 
> the web preview window. Reason: I want to hack up a replacement for 
> TeXShop within TM. Already you can make a command to have pdftex 
> create a .pdf output file and open it in Preview. I'd like it to show 
> up in TM! It would feel cleaner that way.

Agree -- although probably it should just be the command output which 
could be interpreted as PDF, or I should add an AppleScript hook, the 
txmt://-scheme is mostly to allow callbacks from HTML (for which I'm 
not aware of an alternative), not general callbacks.

OS X does have the ability to display PDF, but much of the 
functionality in the Preview app is custom AFAIK, so I'm not sure how 
easy it is to replicate it, but I'll take a look -- I did see that 
Tiger will introduce a PDF Kit (from their announced workshops, I'm not 
in any beta program) which I would imagine is the functionality in 
Preview factored out into a framework.

> 3. Allow syntax files to be reloaded. Then we could edit them within 
> TM and see the results without quitting and restarting.

Yes, I would like to see this handled entirely from within TextMate, 
which should hopefully also encourage the creation of ad hoc scratch 
syntaxes, like matching bullet points in plain text, e.g.:

    {  name = Text;
       patterns = (
          { name = Item; match = "^ ?[*o•·] .*$"; }
       );
    };

And then have the ability to create a macro bound to return which 
repeats the leading bullet for the new line and limits it to “Text > 
Item” in the CSS-inspired way I want to have everything applied (style, 
settings, macros, snippets, commands, etc.).

All part of my master plan which I hope soon to turn into reality :)

Currently the missing piece of the puzzle is how I should pull this off 
with a GUI -- probably though I'll have to resort to a lot of text 
boxes, which I guess is sometimes the price for flexibility.