TextMate Basics Tutorial | Hacker News Reader

TextMate Basics Tutorial

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35 pointstwampss15 comments

My personal quickstart:

  * Disable 'auto-pair characters'. Don't insert crap in my text, just don't do it. Ever.
  * Disable 're-indent pasted text'. Again, stop messing with my stuff.
  * Enable line numbering
  * Delete all the bundles and mess, leaving syntax highlighting. Making sure auto-indent stuff is gone.
  * Enable soft tabs, 4. Not perfect since arrow keys still skip over spaces randomly which is irritating. (Depends if you're on a 'tab stop').

I liked it enough to pay for it, but wish it'd just be a good text editor rather than a "My! It looks like you're writing a factory pattern. Would you like to start the factory pattern wizard?" (Hyperbole but you get what I mean).

The auto-pairing annoyed me at first, but when using other editors I find myself expecting them to give me a matching close brace whenever I type an open brace. It's grown on me.

My main gripe with it is...

  a+4

  hmm I need to change that into 2*(a+4)

  2*()a+4

  for the love of god TextMate, go away!!!!!

You're approaching it the wrong way. TextMate inserts matching pairs around the selection. Just type 2*, then select a+4 and hit (.

I'm too old to change the way I work ;) The extra hassle for saving a keypress isn't worth it IMHO.

If you use TextMate daily I HIGHLY recommend the TextMate book from Pragmatic Press: http://www.pragprog.com/titles/textmate/textmate

One day I'm going to sit down and drill all of this into my head.

Or, you could sit down everyday and pull it into your workflow as needed. No reason to memorize a ton of features you won't use, just know what's available when a problem comes along.

Exactly. I never see the reason of trying to memorize stuff like this. Just learn one useful feature a day, and use it! After a while, it'll just be muscle memory.

Agreed. I have a silly item on my todo list that says "become an expert at emacs," but the trick is to use it everyday, and each time you find yourself doing something repetitive, ask yourself "maybe there's a smarter way to do this," google it, and voila.

On a sidenote, I shelled out for textmate and it's very nice, but now that I work in a more diverse dev environment (Mac/Linux/Windows, and ssh'ing to boxes) learning emacs has become critical for increasing my average productivity.

Still, I don't regret buying textmate. It's beautiful, functional, and inspired some nice features that were subsequently copied/incorporated by others. I wonder what the next version has in store, and how far off it is...

I think that goes without saying, although most of the techniques discussed apply to anyone who would use TextMate. One could compare it to learning vi, but vi kind of forces you to sit down and learn because it's almost unusable without putting a good bit of it into muscle memory. I ran thru some of these, mixed+matched, read some TextMate docs and whipped up a quick cheat sheet on card stock that I taped to the top my center screen. Hopefully the horrificness / embarrassment will motivate me to memorize them.

This is incredibly handy! Just scanned through the page and I picked up a couple things I never knew about.

When will there be a Windows version? :(

Never, to judge from the introductory copy on the TextMate web site. Which I think is a pity, since the editor has some real strengths (although nothing that isn't more or less already available in Vim or Emacs, near as I can tell, if slightly less flashy).

I've played with TextMate a bit, but simply can't commit to learning an editor confined to a single operating system. That way lies Madness, or slower editing everywhere at the very least ;-)

I'm getting into minimalist trolling now, so:

Emacs.

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