[TxMt] Re: document tabs redux / wish list [in a new thread ?]

Mats Persson mats at imediatec.co.uk
Fri Apr 1 09:09:28 UTC 2005


On 1 Apr 2005, at 04:06, David Lee wrote:
> I think it's twice I've been chewed out for threading before...
Apologies David didn't mean to "chew you out", but Sune - the list's 
thread-keeper extraordinarie - has gone awol lately, so I'm just trying 
to fill his very big boots for a short while until I too give up ;-)

> My apologies to Allan for misspelling his name too - It was 3.30 am or 
> so when i wrote this and I was well overdue for a nap.

I didn't mean to attack you personally, but being a Swede with an 
'unusual' name and having lived in the UK for the past 15 years I have 
found that unfortunately the vast majority of English speaking 
clients/'friends' just cannot accept learning a new name. Most insist 
on calling me Mark (WTF!!!!). I personally had two separate instances 
of that yesterday, and your 'mistake' made my cup overflow, I guess.

> Still i think they're good ideas, and some of them worth discussion. 
> Bad moods and basic table manners aside, do you have any reactions to 
> the content?
Yes, and here they come.


On 31 Mar 2005, at 17:44, David Lee wrote:
> 1) < and > arrows appear when more tabs are open than fit. You scroll 
> all the tabs left or right to see tabs offscreen. It scrolls one tab 
> at a time.
>
> 2) When you use the keyboard to move through open files, the 
> arrangement of tabs move to keep the currently open file's tab visible 
> at all times.
>
> 3) The drop-down list of offscreen tabs should stay.

I think Allan's reply to you earlier identified what is in the works 
and how the general consensus was regarding handling many open doc's in 
tabs and so on. Perhaps I don't fully understand your points above, but 
I don't see them as any better than Allan's existing proposals.

> 4) Make people aware that you can hit ctrl-cmd-n to get a new project 
> window, drag the files you're currently working on in there and use 
> the project drawer to flip between them. I just extrapolated this from 
> one of Allen's other posts and it feels very promising.

> Can we be able to 'open these tabs in new project' with a menu command 
> / shortcut? It's not the perfect long term solution but will always be 
> useful whatever is.

Not sure I get your point there either.  The way I (and others ?) work 
is I create a TM project window for each project that I'm working on 
and save the <ProjectName>.tmproj file into the root of that project 
folder. As for flipping through files in the project drawer via 
shortcuts much of that exist today, and the missing parts will be 
improved in a future revision of the project drawer already planned.


> Oh yeah. I'm a split view junkie. Up-down, left-right, any 
> combination. Just the way nature intended.
Discussed till boredom almost, and is planned.

> I'd love to see a good regular expression composer (Komodo does this 
> superbly, Kdevelop well too).

Never used either of those, so don't grep what's so special about them. 
  But what would be nice to have is a simple Command (can be a bundle) 
that takes the selected text - with some kind of identifiers in there 
and then returns the regex for it. Sort of like this:

input:
<key>:[capture1]:</key>
<string>:[capture2]:</string>

output (on clipboard): (<key>(.+)</key>(?s:.*?)<string>(.+)</string>)

Slightly crude idea I know, but still lovely to have and would spare my 
single 'brain'cell for other things ;-)


> And a well considered 'intellisense' implementation which can include 
> your own completion items (and later, those in included files) in 
> heaps of languages.

In what way does not snippets take care of this at the moment ?

> Multiple 'paste previous' / 'paste next' commands rewrite the last 
> ones' output (which can probably be hacked by leaving it selected 
> after each paste, but thats not ideal).

Not getting your point there, sorry. Have a look at Windows->Show 
Clipboard History and explain what's missing in there ?

> A function / class browser.
Have you seen Kumar McMillan's excellent "Special Items..." in the 
Default.tmbundle up on the SVN repos ?? It gives you most of what you 
need, but can still be improved further by Allan inside TM rather than 
as a bundle. (which I think is planned anyway)

> Better print output (allow choice of different font for printing; 
> programmer fonts look terrible) & optionally include syntax 
> highlighting & line numbers.

This printing business was a big thing back in Oct/Nov last year, and 
Allan asked for the basic requirements from us users then. As a fairly 
vocal supporter of printing then I have since only used the printing 
features of TM twice. When I was working with <other leading Mac 
editor> I used to print my code almost daily. Now I don't mainly due to 
a change in workstyle/workflow, but also because of some of TM's 
features.  Try open document in new window, make fullscreen and then 
increase the font size to suit, now lean back in your comfy chair 
(reclining armchair that is ;-) ) and peruse your code screen by 
screen.  It's what I used to do on paper before, but now does on 
screen. Much faster as well.

But yes, all of those printing features could/would be good to have as 
well someday, and I'm 100% certain we will get them, but there's more 
important things for Allan to address before then.


Kind regards,

Mats

----
"TextMate, coding with an incredible sense of joy and ease"
- www.macromates.com -




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