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

[Peter Cowan]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 10:51 AM, Scott Haneda<talklists at newgeo.com> wrote:
> 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.

Using the twilight theme, I see tabs and returns.  I'm guessing the
reason you don't see tabs, is because you have soft tabs on (as you
mention below), in which case the "tab" is five spaces as opposed to a
tab, and thus not shown.

> 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.

Perhaps Edit > Select > Enclosing Brackets will do what you need.
But, I agree more than a blink would be nice.

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

There was a thread about this in the last couple of days, take a peek at that.

> 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.

Shift-cmd-l gets the line (as well as the trailing newline), to get it
w/o the new line you could record a macro.

> 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.
>
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