[TxMt] Re: Inserting text into a background document

[David Green]

On Sep. 26, 2016, at 11:48 pm, Allan Odgaard <mailinglist at textmate.org> wrote:
> Is the issue that it locks the entire application? E.g. if running a (slow) command only blocked the document for which we are waiting for results, would that solve the problem?

That would help, although sometimes I want to be able to continue working on the same document. 

> I assume you need this to also work for untitled documents, otherwise simply updating the file on disk should work.

Right. I’ve been thinking of trying that (save the document, figure out the cursor position, insert the results at that point in the file). One downside is that it means saving untitled or changed docs even if I didn’t want to save them… but in practice, maybe this doesn’t matter much. (How often do I really care about the previously-saved state? And I could always create some sort of backup copies.) I could even save new documents to a specific dir somewhere.

The other downside is that TextMate doesn’t update changed files when it is not in the foreground. It’s useful to see the progress of a command while it runs. Presumably that is a matter of performance, to keep TM well-behaved when it’s in the background. If it could occasionally update itself, every few seconds or even less often, that would be more than good enough for casual monitoring.


-David