Preface
TextMate is a highly extensible Mac OS X GUI text editor that has gained quite a bit of developer notoriety through the years. Created in 2004 by Allan Odgaard, TextMate 1 started out as a simple editor. By 2006, when TextMate 1.5 was released, it won the Apple Design Award for Best Developer Tool, and has gained a vast community backing.
In August 2012, TextMate 2 was released under GNU General Public License and its source code is available at Github. However, this guide will cover the most popular version of the software, TextMate 1.5.
The goal of this book is to provide its readers a succinct set of recipes to become familiar with TextMate's most useful features and bundles, in order to hit the ground running and code more quickly and effi ciently.
What this book covers
Configuring TextMate, guides you through the most common configuration topics so you can customize your TextMate experience quickly.
Installing themes, covers downloading and installing themes to personalize your document window and code coloring.
Quickly navigating to text, demonstrates how to navigate the text and document quickly and easily with keyboard shortcuts.
Converting text, provides an overview of the most common built-in text conversions that will speed up your editing.
Moving and aligning text, walks you through how to move and align text in your document.
Manipulating multiple lines and columns of text, provides a very useful recipe for editing multiple lines of text at the same time.
Finding and replacing text, demonstrates TextMate's extremely powerful Find and Replace functionality.
Folding, teaches you how to use Folding to organize code.
Bookmarking, walks you through using bookmarks to quickly navigate to important lines.
Creating projects, covers creating and saving projects through various methods, including opening directories, dragging-and-dropping, and using the command line.
Utilizing tabs, runs you through the various ways to navigate tabs, mostly via keyboard shortcuts.
Traversing files, teaches you how to quickly and easily open files within a project without reaching for the mouse.
Finding text in a project, describes another way to find text, this time searching through your entire project. This task will also include some tips on how to speed up your search and even cover some caveats for larger projects.
Installing bundles with GetBundles, covers the finding and installation of bundles with GetBundles, which is a bundle that allows you to install other publicly available bundles.
Learning and loving bundles, quickly describes the use of bundles, including the beauty of tab completions and how to easily find the bundle item you're looking for along with the tab completion abbreviation or the keyboard shortcut.
Making a TODO list, utilizes the official TextMate TODO bundle to display a to-do list compiled directly from your project using common comment keywords such as TODO, FIXME, CHANGED, and RADAR.
Becoming a Zen Coding master, demonstrates the Zen Coding philosophy and use of the most common bundle items.
Blogging more efficiently, describes how to use a few of the more useful blogging bundles (Blogging and Hyperlink Helper) in order to work more efficiently when offline.
Markdown and Textile, covers both text formats and describes why you may want to use one over the other depending on your project.
Using macros, provides an overview on how to record and subsequently execute macros in your document to speed up common tasks.
Executing shell commands, demonstrates how to run shell commands directly from the current document.