[TextMate] First impressions

[Eric Curtis]

Hello all,

Well I happen to be one of the people that was eagerly awaiting TM 
after reading all the buzz and never having been that fond of BBedit. 
With that said let me share some of my initial impression after a 
couple of hours of work.

1. Has a great feel overall.
2. Has the best project file list that I have seen, like DW but fast 
and pretty. The Drag and drop from the finder is great.
3. Integrated macros are a big timesaver.

Before the following list I just want to say that TM is the closest to 
perfect text editor I have used however for me it still has a few 
missing items. I would also like to encourage the developers to listen 
closely to these because I have a sense that this might be the perfect 
editor for a heavy duty programmer but the html designer/coder that I 
am might not have been the main focus and with a few improvements they 
could tap a whole other market (please take no ill will from this 
assumption I am quite ready to be told I am wrong, I also think that 
one or two of the following points might be solvable now).

Criticisms and Wish-list (in order of desire to see improved)
4. Dragging an image from the project pane into a HTML file should add 
something like <img src="eric.jpg" alt="eric" width="100" height="100" 
/> and not the actual source code of an image at the insertion point.

5. IMO the preview window needs help. I really do not like the fact 
that it closes when I switch to another document and even worse does 
not reappear when returning to the original document. This is might 
commonly be done when switching to another document to copy and paste 
something. I would much rather see a non-modal preview window that 
updates when as the user switches between files. It would also be 
helpful if it did not display non-html files such as css files.

As a web designer that adheres to web-standards I find myself doing 
quite a bit of work in the CSS file while needing to
to view the html file.  I need to have a html preview open while 
editing the CSS file. I find that I am doing just as much designing in 
code as in photoshop these days. I use a wonderful program called 
CSSedit (http://www.macrabbit.com/cssedit/) for this right now and 
while there preview is not perfect it is much more usable right now. 
Please go and check it out and see if you can provide a quick fix or 
two.

5a. Preview to Browser seems like it is almost there however the 
command currently refreshes the front safari window however it does not 
but the page that I am viewing into safari first! It seems like there 
should be two commands - first preview current page in bowser - and 
then secondly the current command to refresh the page. I think this one 
might be a quick fix as it is in the commands menu (I would do it and 
share if I could but alas I do not know applescript yet.)

6. Context sensitive code completion that is included in skedit and DW 
(XHTML/CSS are most importnat to me).
7. Column select but with the option for discontinuous selections 
(selecting every other line) like subethaedit.
8. Working with a remote server/FTP like DW
9. Split Pane Views

BUGS
1. HTML highlighting seems to break after the following:
<script language="JavaScript" src="behaviors.js" 
type="text/javascript"></script>

2. If you open an HTML page with a Quicktime movie and then go to 
another page the preview window closes (as mentioned above in point 5) 
however I noticed that the movie (or at least the sound) kept playing 
even though the window was gone. So an uneducated guess might be that 
the window is not disposing of all elements that where in it and it 
might represent a significant problem/memory leak if it also not 
disposing flash/shockwave and graphics.

Keep up the great work. I would be very interested in feedback about my 
suggestions from the developer and if they are on the table to be taken 
care of I would strongly consider purchasing a copy now.

Sincerely,

Eric Curtis