[TxMt] Re: req: command output to contextual menu

[Mats Persson]

On 20 Feb 2005, at 13:27, max at machinate.org wrote:
> Maybe it would be a bit harder than I thought to make it backwards
> compatible. Keep thinking about it though.
>
> The reason I asked for it in the first place is that I was making a 
> script
> to insert filenames into textmate, a bit like pressing tab in terminal.
> Sometimes I would get more than one result, and I wanted those to 
> appear in
> a list. Now I've been thinking about it though, it might be a nice 
> thing to
> have this behaviour built into Textmate.
>
> An example would be that if you typed in an html document: "href='i" 
> and
> then pressed tab, you could invoke a menu which showed files matching 
> 'i.*'.
> It could even be multi-dimensional as in my included mock-up.

OK, not wishing to detract, offend or anything else here other than 
being helpfull. Max, you can find a really nice implementation of this 
type of functionality is in skEdit when dealing with <img> or  <a> 
tags. skEdit is $20 and beats both DW & BBEdit, but struggles a bit to 
compare with TM in some areas :)

Now on to the interesting part, where I'm thinking aloud which is not 
always a good thing. :)
Perhaps naively, but I think much of this functionality already exists 
in TM, although I can't see how to control it into a functional format 
right now.  Maybe the grand master Allan can whip something up in his 
magic chambers late at night ??

The required ingredients (with additions):
- Go To File Chooser: (does all we would need in it's non QS way to 
list available files)
	-- need to be able to set search dir starting point: i.e. when typing 
"images/" we only see files in "images" dir
	-- have context flag: i.e. when looking for images we only want to see 
.jpg, .gif, .png files
	-- ability to invoke GTFchooser from commands with path and context 
flag data
		example: $TM_FILE_CHOOSER --path "images/" --context img
	-- ability to receive the output from GTFchooser in a command

- Multiple Commands Pop-up Menu (in use when commands share the same 
key trigger)
	-- ability to invoke the pop-up menu ($TM_POPUP_MENU ??) in a command 
and send it data
	-- ability to receive chosen item from pop-up menu 
($TM_POPUP_MENU_CHOSEN_ITEM ??) and
	   then process that choice to insert correct data rather than what's 
just displayed in the menu
	-- ability to display a simplified version of GTFchooser (with small 
scrollbar) into the menu

Add the above abilities to a command of your liking with whatever 
functionality you'd like and we have a form of TM pop-up menu that can 
enable a multitude of great things!!  File look-ups or auto-completes 
are just two things.
I hope you all can see the same picture/possibilities that I see. 
Apologies if you can't, sort of find it hard to explain it clearly.

Now I do not expect Allan to get this going anytime soon, but sometimes 
he does amaze us mere mortals with his coding skills.

Kind regards,

Mats

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