[TextMate] Unification of snippets, macros & commands (was: cool tip & bug)

[Allan Odgaard]

On 24. Oct 2004, at 8:42, Eric Hsu wrote:

> 3. In some corner of my head I feel like snippets, macros and commands 
> should really all be one type of automation entity. I'm not sure how 
> to do that, but it's a little confusing to have so much power 
> distributed across three different kinds of triggers...

I've been thinking about this myself. I also want templates, drag 
commands, and upcoming "project drawer commands" to be rolled into this 
unification.

In a way, a snippet could be viewed as a normal command, but with 'cat' 
as the interpreter instead of 'bash' (with output set to 'insert as 
snippet').

In a similar way, a macro could also just have another interpreter 
(e.g. 'AppleScript' in the future).

Templates (and drag commands) already are basically just commands, and 
moving them into this unification allows the former to also utilize the 
snippet features (i.e. to have placeholders in the templates).

With regard to the actual trigger, the snippet trigger is basically 
just a multi-stroke hotkey -- I'd like to change this to be a regular 
expression instead (but with slightly changed semantics, in that it'll 
always do non-greedy matching) and introduce some special codes for the 
various modifier keys, then this would be a superset of both hotkeys 
and snippet triggers, but allow so much more customizability, e.g. a 
trigger could be: "\n}" and the command could do a shift-left (i.e. the 
requested de-indent pattern).

There should be an option whether to leave the trigger in the text or 
not (before executing the command).

The downside is that there may be a little more work required, i.e. 
currently the '\t' after the snippet trigger is implicit, and the 'cat' 
interpreter is also implicit.

I'd be interested in hearing peoples thoughts on the issue!


Kind regards Allan