[TxMt] New user: first impressions and feature requests

[BigZite]

Hi Everyone

Just started using TextMate 2 yesterday for coding websites (html5, css, php) and I really like it so far. It's running very stable on OS X mountain lion (not one crash yet). I'm sick of using Dreamweaver because it has bugs and other free titles like blueGriffon are still too buggy on the Mac. The find and replace window you guys built trashes dreamweaver's and runs really fast (except find/replace for "open files" is grayed out). Tabs are great, love the file browser as well. All in all it works fast, stable and looks great.

I'm not a programmer by trade so I hope to give you all some feedback coming from an artist's perspective as I work and see places for improvement.

So far I cannot get my PHP sites to preview. I get errors that the files can't be found even though they are there and if I preview in my browser using MAMP they work fine and also validate with using Validator S.A.C.

I also noticed that when adding php into parts of HTML the syntax highlighting is not consistent (see image below). This primarily happens when doing something like this:

<div class="headerBanner <?php echo $bannerClass; ?>">
	<div class="bannerText"><p><?php echo $bannerText; ?></p></div>
</div>



Also, when using simple PHP stuff like this and not adding a semicolon at the end it also messes up the following syntax highlighting. As far as I know having the semicolon is optional in a case like this. See following images.




Some features I'd like to see added in the future:
It would be nice to have robust preferences/tool for creating syntax highlighting themes and an option to adjust the highlight color. The dark background themes you have are great but I would like to adjust them without having to get into coding since I'm not a programmer. Dreamweaver is pretty good at this although the preview window it gives you is way too small with too little example code. Something like that only done properly would be ideal, and the ability to save and pull up themes quickly would be nice such as in a Themes Panel.

Having icon/toolbar on the top and/or left of the UI would help for quick things, such as turning selection into a comment, uncommenting, folding, formatting, previewing, etc. Dreamweaver users will be familiar with this. For someone like me who uses so many applications, it's getting to the point where remembering more commands may cause cerebral hemorrhaging :P

Biggest thing I could use are code hints. With all the new HTML5 and CSS3 stuff sometimes it's hard to remember every property or value that is accepted. A simple little contextual list that pops up to the right of the code one is typing would be great. I'm sure this would be a bit involved if you haven't started building it but is so handy for web development. blueGriffon has this feature so there should be a way you can do this and avoid patent problems.

Would be great to be able to show favorites panel and the file browser simultaneously and be able to move their location and adjust the divider(s) between them. Ideally, the ability to move panels around allows each user to put things where they want them. The way QT does this is nice although not FOSS.

I would also like to see support for RTF text format. I'd rather use TextMate instead of Apple's TextEdit but it seems I can only make plain text files in TextMate. This would not be for crazy layout/design stuff, but just for taking notes and technical documents so I can use different fonts on my system and adjust font size and styling (B/I/U) on a per character/word/paragraph basis, add hyperlinks, and toss in the occasional image if needed. Basically what an email client allows you to do. If there is a way to do this now please let me know.

I would also like to see some additional formatting options for web development. For CSS control+Q works great, but control+alt+Q removes ALL the spaces. Having more control over this would help during different stages of a project so it's legible until I want to strip the spaces before pushing live. Dreamweaver let's you set various global preferences for CSS formatting like this. It would be nice to be able to adjust this in the preferences so I can get spaces in between properties for legibility: 

example: html{height:100%;width:100%;}     would become-->    html { height:100%; width:100%; }

Also, for formatting (at least CSS), having options like this would help: space before comment, space after comment, one selector per line, one property per line. This way when formatting the file and not just a selection, things would be properly spaced apart, indented, etc. Either the prefs should allow for globally setting this, or variations on control+Q should do it (I also detest using the control key so maybe.

Something that would also be cool is to convert text to HTML ASCII and other methods of munging text and email addresses. I saw the ROT13 stuff but that might be more than needed for what I do in most cases and not sure how compatible it is (i.e. if a user has javascript disabled). 

-----------------------

Here's a few more things to look at for future builds.

HTML and PHP do not auto-format properly. The HTML "Tidy" feature adds in doctype and extra tags I don't need because I'm using PHP and includes to build sites. There should be a way to format HTML and PHP (html files, php files with html, or php functions file) where it indents things properly, leaves spaces between different parts of the document that users can specify, and corrects orphaned or unclosed tags and such. If I try to control+Q on PHP functions it moves them all to the bottom of the document away from the comments and just jacks it all up. Same with control+alt+Q. Examples below of before and after.




When reformatting CSS with @font-face, control+alt+Q produces weird results and some strange looking white box symbol. control+Q works fine.



--------------------------

Anyway, hope some of the explanations will help. I'm not a programmer so the most I can do is make suggestions. If you'd like me to mockup any of my ideas as far as how they could work in a UI, let me know.

thanks

D

brieftrager at bigzite.com
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