[TextMate] Praise and Comments

[Rich Barton]

Just thought I'd chime in with my experiences of using TM over the last 
couple of days.

Firstly, may I heap lavish praise on the developer(s). The 
live-updating project drawer (despite its shortcomings, below) is 
fantastic, and the Esc autocomplete is nothing short of magic. How does 
it *always* seem to guess the right completion for a given start string 
out of many possibilities?  Regardless, this has made coding a lot less 
laborious. The snippet and macro features are also great time savers.

But enough of the praise, here's my comments and suggestions :-)

* I rarely want to view the ASCII version of an image file. How about a 
preview of the image in the editor pane instead?
* Whilst speed is generally not an issue, there is an annoying 2-4 
second delay (i.e. spinning beach-ball) when switching to TM when I've 
got an (open) project located on an SMB share.
* By default, TM requires a lot of keyboard mashing for relatively 
common commands. For instance, I see no reason why the Command + Option 
+ Control + D for toggling the project drawer can't simply be Command + 
D (in fact, I've hacked this myself in IB and it works fine)
* How about a split view (i.e. the ability to see different sections of 
the same document at once)?
* TM doesn't seem to remember the window scroll position if you do the 
following: open a document (that scrolls), and scroll down without 
changing the insertion point. Switch to another document/tab. Switch 
back. The window scroll position is back to its original position, and 
is no longer at the section of text I was looking at.
* When searching within a document for a string located "below the 
fold", the matching string barely creeps "above the fold", i.e. is 
bottom aligned relative to the window. This makes it harder to see the 
match in context. I prefer the behaviour (which I believe BBEdit 
exhibits) whereby the matching string is centred vertically in the 
window, making it easier to spot and put in context.
* How about being able to create a "real" folder (as opposed to a 
group) in the project draw?
* I would like the group name to be selected and editable immediately 
after its creation, à la "New Folder" in the Finder
* The Shift Left/Shift Right commands exhibit weird behaviour. I expect 
them to work like Command + [ and Command + ] in BBEdit or SubEthaEdit, 
but they don't. (Sorry for the vagueness. It's easier for you to see it 
yourself than for me to describe how.)

Overall, I like the direction TextMate is going in.

Regards,

Rich Barton