[TxMt] Services menuitem

[Charilaos Skiadas]

On May 9, 2006, at 3:57 AM, Egil Helland wrote:

> I have read and seen the "edit in TextMate" functionality, but  
> would rather than having a hack use the Services menu for this. I  
> have also read that this was a functionality before that was  
> removed. Is it possible to add that back in easily? Those who don't  
> want to have this Services menuitem can then use e.g. Service  
> Scrubber (http://www.petermaurer.de/nasi.php? 
> section=servicescrubber) to remove it.

One of the reasons the behavior changed was that with a service, the  
application calling the service is blocked until the service  
finishes. I.e. when you use edit in textmate as a service from a  
textfield in your browser, you cannot use your browser again until  
you finish editing, and strange things happen (IIRC) if you switch to  
your browser accidentally. I tend to use the browser quite a bit  
while writing, so I personally ran into problems with this all the time.

The advantage of the service menu item option is that it works with  
mozilla and camino as well, if I remember correctly. One of the big  
disadvantages is that it requires you to select the text you want to  
edit first.  If you are going to have to select the text anyway, just  
do a copy, move to textmate, open new document, paste and edit away,  
then select-all, copy, paste back. Only 6 extra keystrokes, plus one  
to set the language for the document if it's not plain text.

I wouldn't call the current "Edit in TextMate" a hack. It is an Input  
Manager, actually used for what Input Managers are essentially  
supposed to do. You can even provide it with a list of applications  
that you do not want it to target.

> Or am I missing something here?
>
> -e
>
> --
> egil helland / it consultant (mcse, web technology)
> web: ikon.as / egil.net        mob: +47-91315555

Haris