[TextMate] My TextMate experiences

Scott Barron scott at elitists.net
Thu Oct 7 01:27:35 UTC 2004


Looks like things are calming down a little so I thought I'd chime in
with my TM experiences.  I used it all day today for hacking on a Rails
app and here are my thoughts.  I've avoided putting in nits that I've
seen addressed already, though it's possible I've missed seeing some,
please forgive me if there are duplicates :)  My editing background is
that I'm a hardcore vim user and I quite dislike using the mouse while
editing.

Issues
 * Renaming a group is kind of a pain, can it default to being ready to
   edit when you click to make a new group?

 * A language nitpick, the message on the group info window ... "What
   did you expect to find here? ..."  I dunno, seems a little
   unfriendly?

 * There seem to be some pretty annoying issues with the whole tree in
   the drawer collapsing without my telling it to do so.  For example,
   have a group with folders in it, do the info on that folder to change
   the regex, then when the changes get applied *poof* the tree
   collapses.  It has also collapsed at random times when I've switched
   back to the desktop TM was on, though I cannot consistently reproduce
   this, it just happens whenever.

 * Any way to undo more than one character at a time?  This is arduous,
   though it may be difficult to implement without modes (ala vim).

 * Dragging things around in the tree seems to be more painful than it
   should.  I'm not sure why, but I was trying to drag a folder such
   that it would be below (but not nested in) another folder and I
   couldn't get it to go.  I became frustrated and deleted the reference
   and re-added the folder.  Anybody else experience this, or is it just
   me?

Feature Requests
  * Completions drawn from all open files, please?

  * Auto un-dent things like (in Ruby) else, end, closing braces, etc?

The major issue for me is the collapsing of the tree that is going on.
Other than that this thing is pretty sexy.  I enjoy the organization it
provides me and I look forward to the next release after this flood of
feedback you have recieved from the users.  I'm confident that it will
be quite nice.

Thanks
-Scott



More information about the textmate mailing list