[TxMt] a shell mode for TextMate?

[Allan Odgaard]

On 31. Jul 2007, at 00:02, Pete Siemsen wrote:

> [...] I can place the caret in an IP address, autonomous system  
> number or VLAN number, hit the "help" key, and TextMate looks up  
> and displays a tooltip window that tells me what I'm looking at  
> [...] I'd like to have the same functionality when I'm logged into  
> a device interactively.

Not as convenient as customizing TextMate, but OS X has “services”  
which are actions you can run on the selection in basically every  
application. ThisService [1] is a way to write such services in a  
scripting language. So in practice you might be able to write a  
service for this IP address look-up which can be used in Terminal.

[1]: http://wafflesoftware.net/thisservice/

> [...]
> If TextMate supported this, it would be an invaluable aid when I'm  
> working on network devices.  It could probably be used in similar  
> scenarios to give TextMate users their own dynamic help for various  
> command-line interfaces.

The main problem with creating such mode is that there are like 30  
years of legacy stuff involved when creating a terminal emulator.  
I.e. this would be a serious drain on my resources, alone fully  
understanding all this tty stuff is beyond my current capabilities.

My secret plan is to open up more of TextMate’s internal API (in 2.x)  
and hopefully then someone else can create a terminal mode / port an  
existing terminal to use TextMate as back-end or similar.