[TxMt] UI - redistributing the density

[John Fieber]

On Feb 8, 2006, at 10:55 PM, Eric O'Brien wrote:

> Furthermore, the way that "I" mentally "clump" functionality often  
> is not the way it is clumped in TextMate.  For example... I  
> remember that I can do something.  But is it a built-in feature, or  
> in a macro, command or snippet?  (Oh! I just noticed:  apparently,  
> the "gear" icon combines access to all three?)

I would like quicker navigation to macros/commands/snippets for the  
current language--optimize for the common case, but still make the  
uncommon possible.  And from the access/use point of view, I'm not at  
all convinced that the macro/command distinction is useful.

I'd like the gear menu to be more like this with current language  
snippets/commands at the top level:

   Snippet a
   Snippet b
   Snippet ...
   Snippet n
   Command a
   Command b
   Command ...
   Command n
   Other modes -> Mode ->  (snippets and commands)

One keystroke or one click and you can immediately see the commands  
most relevant to the mode and only have to navigate up/down rather  
than right/left/up/down to get at what you want.

A similar optimization of elevating the current mode could be applied  
to the Automation menu.  And put a language selection there as well  
since the all the stuff in that menu is so intimately tied to the  
language selection.

In the keyboard shortcut department, it can be confusing to browse  
commands/macros, take note of keyboard shortcuts only to find they do  
something completely different because of the language.   Some  
shortcuts work independent of Language simply because there are no  
collisions, but for shortcuts that are multiply defined, it can be  
confusing.   I'd like to see the shortcut display in the gear menu  
and the Automation menu filtered by the current language so that any  
shortcut only appears once in the whole menu structure and only for  
the action the shortcut will actually trigger.

For example, ^H doesn't "search on Apache.org" if my language is  
Objective-C, so don't show ^H as a shortcut for it when my language  
is Objective-C.

-john