[TxMt] My experience with TextMate

[Milen Dzhumerov]

Hello list,

I've been trying out TM for several weeks now and I wanted to  
document my experiences so they are lost (maybe other people feel the  
same).

Things which I miss:

- CodeSense: Basically this is my reason for not switching to  
TextMate. There is an enormous amount of APIs on the Mac and I don't  
think developers should be expected to know each method and its  
arguments in their heads. Copying/Pasting from the Xcode  
documentation browser doesn't cut it - the time spent on this  
actually outweighs the benefits of using TM (for me personally). The  
day a CodeSense/IntelliSense/WhateverSense is implemented in TextMate  
you will have another customer. For now I'm putting my TM switch on  
hold.

-.m/.h open in the same window: This is more of a convenience thing.  
It's just annoying me to have headers/implementation files open in  
different tabs/windows because I just want to have a quick look in  
the header and switching to another tab wastes time/distracts. I'm  
probably nitpicking here but that's how I feel about it.

Things which could be improved:

- Response time of clicking on a tab: I'm a performance geek. If  
something is sluggish it is annoying me so much that the application  
goes into the bin immediately. This is why Xcode is just killing me  
each day but I have not other choice (anyone noticed the delays in  
clicking a file in the list of files?). If you try switching to  
another tab in TM it's not that bad - it's snappy but there is a  
slight delay between the click of the mouse and the view of the new  
tab. As I said it's not something really important it is just  
annoying me - that is on a 2.0GHz Core Duo iMac with 2GB of RAM and  
the 256VRAM - so shouldn't be because of a slow machine.

Things which would be nice to have:

-Split views: Horizontal/Vertical split views would be great.  
Currently on my widescreen LCD there is a lot of (horizontal) space  
wasted. The perfect solution would be that the split views would  
share the tabs (i.e. not having a separate tab list for each split  
view).

Things which I like:

- Anti-aliasing on/off: Just a big thanks! I cannot believe how many  
people are coding using anti-aliased fonts - that's such a nightmare  
if you stare at the screen for 8 hours straight (pixel fonts are the  
way for me). Thank you very much for that nifty checkbox.

- Macros: _THE_ biggest time-saver.

Kind regards,
Milen Dzhumerov

Email: gamehack at 1nsp1r3d.co.uk
Web: http://www.1nsp1r3d.co.uk/