How Alex Payne Uses TextMate | Hacker News Reader

How Alex Payne Uses TextMate

al3x.net

45 pointstwampss32 comments

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And all the smug emacs and vim users just nod and says "Welcome to the party".

:%s/party/war

There are lots of emacs and vim refugees in TextMate land as well. (I'm a refugee from both.)

I've always found Textmate to be emacs-y. One reason I like it

they aren't at the party until textmate has a turing-complete programming language built in. It has a while to go.

This sounds like Paris Hilton advising me what to wear in my bag.

Slightly OT, but: "1. Open TextMate. 2. Type "lorem". 3. Hit tab."

http://twitter.com/mikeysan/status/1040902296

I don't have textmate, but I have must-know-the-answer syndrome. I'm guessing it rkcnaqf gb gur yberz vcfhz grkg. (rot13) Can you confirm?

Yes. That is correct.

Payne says "My only hesitation was that TextMate was getting to be practically (although hyperbolically) abandonware. Thankfully, this fear was assuaged by a recent update over the Thanksgiving holiday. It lives!"

I can't find any reference to such an update - according to VersionTracker, the last update was 1.5.7 on 10/26/07.

Not sure about the update, but the TextMate mailing lists and IRC channel are very active. TextMate 2.0 is in the works. It's hardly abandonware.

I noticed that, too. Perhaps he is referring to "Cutting-Edge" updates? I'm on build 1436 (Minor Updates) and 1496 is available now.

Ah, that's it - I hadn't noticed that option in the Preferences. But yes, turn on Cutting Edge updates in the Updates preference, and now I get offered 1496.

I bought TextMate back in early 2005, so was a pretty early user. I love it, but I use almost none of these advanced features. It's just a really solid text editor for me. I don't know the combinations for macros and what not and it's still worth the money :)

Here is his article about why not to use emacs:

http://al3x.net/2008/10/22/on-flight-to-old-text-editors.htm...

Wow. My faith in the human race has just decreased significantly. I wonder if people writing blogs realize that when they just make stuff up, it makes them look stupid.

I like the design of this blog. Navigation at the end forces you to at least skim the blog post.

I've fallen in love with the vertical selection feature (option + drag).

You can even create a vertical insertion point and anything you type or delete will appear or disappear on all selected lines.

http://sethmason.com/blog/23/vim-tip-select-column

jEdit has this too. alt-backslash and ctrl-backslash toggle multiple selection/insert and rectangular selection/insert. So you can select multiple blocks of text, then what you type will replace all of them at once.

Wow, that's pretty awesome. Can you do this without using the mouse?

Of course. jEdit uses standard shift+direction selection. And like most good text editors, you can map or remap any command to any key combination.

My blog is in a state of utmost disrepair, but if I ever clear its personal content and reboot it as a professional blog, a "hey everybody, jEdit" post will be pretty early on. I think it strikes a nice balance between vim/emacs-like power and GUI-app usability, and as one of the few high-quality Java desktop apps, it's cross-platform.

Please do!

email me your blog info (not in your profile) so i can suscribe for when you get around to it. aaron.blohowiak@gmail.com

It's personal right now, I mean to privately archive the old content and start fresh. Once I get around to rebooting it, I'll self-promote by posting something here once I write something people might be interested in. Thanks for your interest, though!

Except for mouse interaction (correct me if I'm wrong, GVim vets), Visual mode in Vim puts TextMate's block select to shame (docs: http://www.vim.org/htmldoc/visual.html) because it allows you to use Vim's other editing commands (replace, change, insert from beginning or end, etc.). Not to mention that you can select this block based on Vim motions. I guess this all adds up to Vim surpassing most other editors when it comes to selecting text, which is a given considering its focus on moving around code.

vim has it too, powerful indeed

select the block use v or ^v and navigate with hjkl, do commands like c,d

replace string in text selection -> v (or ^v) + hjkl + :s/old/new

comment a block of code (5 lines) with # -> 0 + ^v + 5j + I + # + Esc + j

as a plus, u don't need mouse ... fear the simplicity

Notepad++ does that too (back before I was a happy TextMate/OSX.. Notepad++ on Win gave a good experience)

Emacs: Rectangular selection. A complete superset of that functionality. Check out the C-x r --- key combos.

Inserting in a rectangle: C-x r t Deleting in a rectangle: C-x r d

and more...

Note that if you cut and paste Alex's .ackrc (at least in Firefox 3), you'll get one leading whitespace character on each line. This will cause problems if you don't notice it. :)

The GetBundles links aren't working for me, and I can't find any reference to it anywhere else via google or github. Am I completely crazy?

That SVN repo was down, it's back now (5:30 PM PST).

  cg5[14:14] Bundles > svn co http://svn.textmate.org/trunk/Review/Bundles/GetBundles.tmbundle/
  svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/trunk/Review/Bundles/GetBundles.tmbundle'
  svn: PROPFIND of '/trunk/Review/Bundles/GetBundles.tmbundle': 503 Service Unavailable (http://svn.textmate.org)

I didn't know there was an updated version over thanksgiving. Heck I didn't know that it had been updated at all in a year. You might need to select the "cutting edge" option in prefs though.

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