[TxMt] General things I should know, but don't

[Scott Haneda]

I spent yesterday watching a handful of screencasts for learning  
jquery. I was shown perhaps 5 or more editors, and started to see  
value in workflows I am not able to replicate.

I'm sure I'm just missing some prefs, pointers appreciated.

Vertical grid on tab stops. How do I turn this on? Seeing where a  
statement begins and then closes at a glance is very powerful. In  
jquery with all the parens and brackets, this visual alignment would  
help a lot.

I think this may not be possible. I figured I could get by with show  
invisibles. I'm not seeing tabs or spaces, just returns. I would also  
want to set returns and spaces to the same bg color to hide them. Too  
much noise.

I tried multiple themes, I can not get invisibles to show other than  
returns, which I don't need to see anyway.

Code reformatting. If I take any small chunk of jquery, select it,  
navigate to the bundle for JavaScript and tell it to reformat the  
code, it more or less reformats to a few lines. What am I doing wrong?

Indenting. If sample code is copied in with say, 1 or 2 spaces used as  
indents, and I like to use 5 soft tabs, I'm finding no way to adjust  
that code to my tab stops. I end up retabbing it by hand.

Next up would be where the open or close brace or paren is thought to  
be. I see I can get a blink on some parens but not others.

What are the rules that define this blinking and can it be expanded?  
Also, the blinking is not quite enough for me. Having the actual open  
and close characters actively highlighted when your cursor is to the  
left or right, massively helpful to me.

Current word highlighting. If a variable, class, method etc are  
clicked on, how can I get all occurances of that word also highlighted.

Projects. I don't often get a chance to clone down an entire site and  
work locally. Is it correct there is no way to get a remote FTP based  
site to remember code folding or work in a project?

I would be happy to figure out how to drag a window into a tab from a  
remote site, that would go a long ways.

I don't always get ssh access, and I'm sure some will suggest  
expandrive. To be honest, I've tried it. There are too many reports of  
it failing on FTP to even list a directory. I worry it may delete  
remote files. I worked a little with the expandrive people, giving  
them access to an FTP server that matched the issues many others were  
reporting, currently still seeing broken behavior.

I'm a little stubborn in that if I'm going to use a tool, I would want  
to use it everywhere, not just on ssh connections. Jumping from one  
toolset to another tends to take my brain too long to shift back into  
being productive.

Saving. Is there a way to get save to have the entire filename  
selected? The trailing .html is something I'm always having to trim  
off. Usually I just command-A then start typing. Looking to save a step.

Is there a way to select the current line only up to the first and  
last characters?like select word, but for a line.

Is there a way to tell a line to best guess the correct indent level,  
and shove it in place?

I have a feeling some of these issues have solutions and I just don't  
know where to look. Others i suspect I may be stuck on. Looking for  
any old hats that have been down this road before.

Thanks. As a side note, watching some of these screencasts, I can  
certainly say, TM's features certainly should be adopted by other  
editors, I don't know how some people get by.

If I had to put two items on a list, vertical tab grid lines and  
remote conection meta data saved would be pretty high up there.

Thanks everyone.
-- 
Scott
Iphone says hello.