Textmate Love

I've tried huge number of text editors and IDE's, especially on my windows era, none so well balanced in features, limitations, looks and speed.

Its appraised by the ruby community, especially because of the early ruby on rails screencasts made by David Heinemeier Hansson, but not only, to me this little application has the same magical effect as ruby: Simple is good. (and powerful)
Is an application i tend to be using using all day long. For: quick text editing, running/coding/documentation and validate ruby, code/validate/compress and minimize javascript, svn interactions, preview and validation of html and even for writing docs, from blog entries to full pdf documents(check my upcoming post on markup languages).

check it on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextMate


Plugins i use a lot:
  • Ruby
  • MultiMarkdown
  • Subversion
  • SVNMate, to show svn icons on files inside project drawer.
  • HTML
  • Javascript
  • Javascript tools
  • GetBundle
The Plugins can be customized, and you can add your own commands easily, even in Ruby :)


Couple of tips i find useful:

  • Ctrl+S for a firefox/safari like search with word highlight .
  • Quicksilver can be used to access textmate commands, by using a quicksilver proxy, so if you don’t want to pick up the mouse and select a command from menu and you don’t remember the shortcut, you can always open quicksilver proxy and use its text search capabilities to find the command, for example, image you are editing an html page and you want to validate syntax, you can do:
    1. Alt+Space(opens quicksilver proxy)
    2. type “w3c”, to find: “Validate syntax (w3c)”
    3. press Enter
  • Ctrl+Apple+T, will give you the “Select Bundle Item” box where you can do the same example as above.
  • Apple+T, will open “Go To File”.
  • Alt->mouse select text, will do vertical selection of text.
  • Debugging Bundle Commands, if you are making your own command, select Output: Create New document, or Output: Show as tool tip. You’ll get outputted into a new document the result of script execution.

No comments: