[TxMt] Re: Non-contiguous selection

[Allan Odgaard]

On 24 Jun 2008, at 15:26, Patrick James wrote:

> [...]
> So, the moral of my story is that in a text editor with GREP Find/
> Replace having non-contiguous text selection brings a massive amount
> of additional text editing power.

My last comments on this: http://lists.macromates.com/textmate/2007-August/021949.html

As for your smart-quotes example, have a look at http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/ 
  -- this will also skip text inside <pre> etc. It is included with  
TextMate, so you can e.g. use ⌥⌘R and type ‘SmartyPants.pl’. We  
don’t have a dedicated command for it, but the Markdown conversion  
commands (in the Markdown bundle) uses it.

I know your quotes thing was just an example, but I think in most  
examples where discontinous selection can be used, there is often an  
existing solution which does the job fine. As mentioned in the linked- 
too letter, the discountinous selection will introduce _a lot_ of  
complexity for all commands that work with a selection, and I don’t  
feel that is worth it (and in TextMate, as opposed to e.g. Nisus  
Writer, commands for the most part are user-extensions, and the simple  
contract we presently have for these is IMHO a major contributing  
factor to the amount of useful bundle commands we have today).

Also, I have another feature coming in 2.0 which will allow you to  
effectively do the further replacements on the results of a ‘find  
all’ (so even w/o SmartyPants.pl, there will be a simple way to do  
the same).

I do however feel TM needs a way to highlight discontinuous text  
segments, and technically this can be made using dynamic scopes, which  
in practice can be used by a command to “parse out” the selection…