[TxMt] HTML bundle & HTML usage ( Was: Input Patterns?)

[Mats Persson]

On 5 Apr 2005, at 20:16, kumar mcmillan wrote:
> I understand you have put a lot of work into all these snippets, but 
> if you want my [humble] opinion, I don't see the need to have snippets 
> for all the possible things you can type in a language like HTML.

Hmm, Kumar, is this the same guy that made the PHPDoc snippets in the 
PHP bundle speaking ? ;-) I personally see no difference in value 
between yours and mine.

> Don't get me wrong, I am lazy :D but I find typing <h1> A HEADER and 
> then hitting opt+cmd+"."  to close the tag much easier than inserting 
> a snippet called "<h1>" .

Personally I find typing  h1 + [tab] and then the content within the 
<h1></h1> tags much faster with a second tab out of it. ( I set the 
official <hN> snippets to h1-6 as the tab triggers)

I do understand what you are saying Kumar, and I don't exactly disagree 
with you. However, there are two main reasons why I'm doing it:
1. Some users (= mainly new TM trial users) don't like the lack of code 
completion and so on that they are used to in their other apps. 
Although not the same, I am hoping that these snippets will go some way 
towards helping with that.

2.  I was used to hand coding most tags myself in BBEdit before, 
together with a few glossary items. However, after using TM I found 
that being able to store common code bits as snippets cut down on my 
typing and kept a consistent style throughout my code. In other words I 
was more productive and produced better code and all I had to remember 
was a number of tab trigger names instead of some more complicated tags 
and their various attributes etc. (the <hN> is not a good example of 
this)

> I would suggest focusing on bigger time-savers ... like the 
> Colorpicker command.  that thing is awesome!!

Yes, the ColorPicker is cool. What other commands would you want ? 
Please give me some examples and ideas. I've added some new ones and is 
working on others:
-- "Delete whitespace between tags" which speeds up the cleaning of 
spaces between tags in old 'dirty' unorganised html code
--  A better <!-- --> HTML comment command that handles un-commented 
blocks, blocks with comments within them already and so on.
To mention just two, and I even hope to create a bunch of Tidy commands 
to help people produce better code faster. So I'm all for creating 
time-savers. Just let me know which ones you are thinking of.

> Anyway, I don't want to dampen your progress but I think you are 
> asking for help in an area where other users may not share your 
> vision.

No worries, Kumar, lack of time and energy can dampen my progress, but 
not really anyone's rightful comments. As for others not sharing my 
visions, well, there's nothing new there, but then I know that I have 
been proven right more than once in the end. All I say is don't work in 
the same old ways when you can be more productive. And I seriously 
doubt that either you or other users can't do with a bit of 
productivity boosting in your work life, especially when coding boring 
HTML. But hey, I've been wrong before, so nothing new there either ;-)

Personally, I think the biggest problem I will face when asking for 
help from others is the general lack of willingness to help anyone else 
in our society today, because we can all justify ourselves as being too 
busy to help out right now. Unfortunately, I was born into an 
idealistic family that thought "do good and good will be done to you". 
I know, many would think of that as "stupid silly notions", but I 
don't.


Kind regards,

Mats

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