TextMate 1.5.3 review
DownloadTextMate attempts to bring Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors.
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TextMate attempts to bring Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike. With a wealth of exclusive features like tabs, foldings, and macros, TextMate is well ahead of other native, graphical editors on OS X — and you don't have to sell your bones to afford it.
Whether you're a programmer or a designer, the production of code and markup is hard work. Without an editor dedicated to the task, it's also often cumbersome, overwhelming, and repetitive. Especially when you're dealing with a lot of files at once — like most projects do.
TextMate puts you back in control, reduces the mental overhead, and turns manual work into something the computer does.
Here are some key features of "TextMate":
Dynamic file outline
Before you can get any work done, you need to be on top of your artifacts, such as stylesheets, includes, libraries, and application code. By arranging your files in an outline that follows the existing directory structure, it's no longer necessary to switch back and forth between Finder and editor to locate the next thing you need to work on.
The file outline is automatically kept up to date with changes occurring on the file system, so if you have a build script or generator that sprinkles files across multiple directories, they're instantly available in the outline.
You can also move files from one directory to another in the outline and the change is reflected on the file system. Just as you can easily add new files to any directory you select and they'll be placed as you'd expect.
Reorder the tabs
Once you've found the files you want, it's incredibly easy to jump between them using tabs that can be reordered as you see fit. Your new-found overview allows for a greater number of files to be open at the same time — without constantly resorting to Expos?, minimizing, or other window managing techniques for the big picture.
Go back through copies with the clipboard history
Each time you copy something, it is thrown onto the stack, so all previous clips still exist. By holding down shift (?) when you paste, you go one step back on this stack, so you can easily do multiple cuts and paste them again, or you can open the clipboard history window to inspect the stack.
Hide what you don't need with foldings
With foldings you can collapse method definitions in your class files or tables and divs in your markup. That way you only get the detailed view of the active segment while the rest is available at a glance.
The foldings automatically appear following a specification in the syntax files, so all you have to do is decide what to keep open and what to close.
Macros: Record and replay
Whenever you find yourself repeating the same text or transformation, you have a good candidate for a macro. Macros let you record just about any editing task you perform, including piping the selection through a unix command, performing regular expression replaces, or just plain and simple movement of the insertion point.
Recordings are activated with menu items (or their key equivalents) and the recorded macro can be saved for later use and even be given an arbitrary key equivalent to recall it. A powerful way to extend the basic functionality of TextMate.
Expand triggers to full snippets
Snippets allow you to quickly insert text you type a lot. In this text you can embed placeholders (with default values) for where the insertion point should move to when pressing tab.
A snippet can either be inserted from the menu, or simply by entering the "trigger" and pressing tab, so e.g. typing "nsA" and pressing tab could insert "NSMutableArray* array = [NSMutableArray array]" and leave the former "array" selected (the placeholder).
But in the end it's all about the touch and feel
We've given you a taste of the amazing and frequently exclusively features of TextMate, but in the end it's all about the tactile experience. An editor needs to have a good fit. By going with Apple's Cocoa framework, but avoiding the basic NSTextView that most other Cocoa-editors on OS X uses, we've done our utmost to make TextMate feel good without compromising on the features.
Limitations:
30 days trial.
What's New:
Multi-stroke key bindings (configured in ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict) are now supported.
If an uppercase filter string is used for the Select Bundle Item… list (??T) then all items become candidates (not just those reachable from the current scope.)
The list which appears when using the Select Bundle Item… action now show key equivalents and tab triggers for the bundle items.
When double-clicking Find in Project results the window will close.
It is now possible to use “*” as extension for a drag command to make it trigger for all extensions (and files w/o extension.) If multiple drag commands apply and they have the same scope selector those not using wildcard matching will win.
To aid bundle developers there now is a View -> View Source menu action (option-cmd U to conform to Mail and Safari) which shows the source of the current WebView as a new document -- ticket D708A842.
The display name of a bundle item (when shown in the Select Bundle Item… list) now contains the name of its potential containing menu. For example the “Bold” item (in the LaTeX bundle) shows as “Format ? Bold — LaTeX.” This does make the list look a tad more cluttered, but some item titles are ambiguous w/o the containing menu title. Currently the filter string only applies to the title of the item (and not the parent menu.)
…more release notes included with the application.
TextMate 1.5.3 keywords