[TxMt] Problem launching TextMate from terminal in Leopard

[Allan Odgaard]

On 19 May 2008, at 21:53, Steven Martin wrote:

> OK, After I run 'mate' from Apple Terminal application (ver 2.0.1),  
> and the
> application hangs, here is the log of output using 'sample TextMate  
> 10':
> Analysis of sampling TextMate (pid 88957) every 1 millisecond
> [...]

I fear what you see is a performance bug with Leopard’s /etc/profile.

When you launch TM, it will ask you if you want to install the  
‘mate’ shell command. To get suggested installation locations it  
runs a shell script that sources amongst others /etc/profile (to get  
your normal PATH to use as hint).

Unfortunately /etc/profile has a call to /usr/libexec/path_helper  
which is exponential in the length of the PATH variable.

So you get the problem when launching TM from the shell presumably  
because the PATH there are significantly longer than launching e.g.  
from Finder.

I think if you update to cutting edge, the problem may have been  
avoided by only calling the shell script when necessary otherwise you  
will need to either disable the call to path_helper in /etc/profile or  
try pick Help → Terminal Usage… and re-install mate, so that TM  
records in the preferences, that this helper is already installed¹.


¹ The process might be something like, TM not seeing in preferences  
that you installed the mate shell command, then collecting install  
paths, checking these to see if ‘mate’ is already there, and if so,  
bypass the dialog. So not seeing the dialog on startup is not  
necessarily indicative of TM having recorded in the preferences, that  
the tool is already installed (but given this Leopard problem, it  
probably should record it, when it finds ‘mate’ in one of the  
suggested installlocations).