TextMate

TextMate

TextMate icon
Developer(s)	Allan Odgaard (MacroMates)
Stable release	1.5.6 (r1401)
Repository	github.com/textmate/textmate
Operating system	Mac OS X
Type	text editor
License	Proprietary
Website	MacroMates

TextMate is a general-purpose GUI text editor for Mac OS X. It provides users with innovative abstractions to support declarative customizations which are at once transparent and flexible. Though its users are mostly programmers and its basic feature set may require more learning than simpler graphical editors, TextMate is much easier to customize than many other text editors. Notable features include tabs, recordable macros, folding sections and snippets, shell integration, and an extensible bundle system, all built around its novel scope system.

TextMate 1.5 won the Apple Design Award for best developer tool in 2006.

History

In 2004, Allan Odgaard, unsatisfied both with existing Macintosh text editors such as TextEdit, BBEdit, and XCode, which he felt were inflexible and limited, and with Unix editors such as Vim and Emacs, which do not feel like native Mac applications, set out to create a text editor. TextMate 1.0 came out on 5 October 2004, after only 5 months of full-time development, quickly followed on 21 October 2004 by 1.0.1. The release focused on implementing a small feature set well, and did not have a preference window or a toolbar, didn’t integrate FTP as BBEdit does, and had no options for printing, to the chagrin of some reviewers, who didn’t know what to make of the spartan editor window. At the beginning only a small number of programming languages were supported, as only a few “language bundles” had been created. On the other hand, many raved about its unique features, and welcomed a new editor to a market they felt had stagnated with the dominance of BBEdit.

Over the next year after TextMate 1.0.2, which came out on 10 December 2004, a series of TextMate 1.1 betas shipped, and the program steadily improved, in the process picking up a preferences window with a GUI for creating and editing themes, a status bar with a symbol list, and menus for choosing language and tab settings, a “bundle editor” for editing language grammars, commands, snippets, etc., and lots of general polish. Then on 6 January 2006, MacroMates released TextMate 1.5, the first “stable release” since 1.0.2. Reviews were overwhelmingly positive, and many reviewers who had previously found fault with the program now enthusiastically endorsed it.

TextMate is continuing to develop at a rapid rate. In February 2006, the TextMate blog expressed intentions for future directions, including improved project management, with a plug-in system to support remote file systems such as FTP, and revision control systems such as Subversion.

On 8 August 2006, TextMate was awarded the Apple Design Award for Best Developer Tool, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California, to “raucous applause.” It was recently the “Featured Download” among developer tools at Apple’s website.

Features

TextMate has several features which set it apart from other editors. Its customizable macros, commands, and snippets allow complex behavior to be automated, and its CSS-inspired scope system, unique among text editors, allows arbitrarily complex nested syntax highlighting.

Nested scopes

TextMate allows users to easily create their own arbitrarily complex syntax highlighting modes by using a modified version of the Apple ASCII property list format to define language grammars. These grammars allow nesting rules to be defined using the Oniguruma regular expression library, and then assigned specific “scopes”: compound labels which identify them for coloration.

Each point of a document therefore is assigned one or more scopes, which define where in the document the point is, how it should be colored, and what the behavior of TextMate should be at that point. For instance, the title of one of the links in the “External links” section has the scope:

text.html.mediawiki markup.list.mediawiki meta.link.inline.external.mediawiki string.other.link.title.external.mediawiki

This scope tells us that we are looking at a link title within a link within a list within a MediaWiki document.

TextMate themes can mark-up any scope they choose, at varying levels of precision. For instance, one theme may decide to color every constant (constant.*) identically, while another may decide that numerical constants (constant.numeric.*) should be colored differently than escaped characters (constant.character.escape.*). The nested scope syntax allows language authors and theme authors differing levels of coverage, so that each one can chose to opt for simplicity or comprehensiveness, as desired.

Macros

TextMate, like many other editors before it, allows users to record a series of actions in a temporary macro, for automating repetitive tasks. Useful macros can be saved for later use. Macros can string together other automation features, including other macros.

Snippets

At their simplest, TextMate “snippets” are useful snippets of text which can be inserted into the document at the current location. But more complicated behaviors are possible, based on a few useful generalizations of this idea. First, snippets can include one or more “tab stops”, which can be cycled through using the “tab” key. Second, the results of these tab stops can be dynamically changed in another portion of the snippet, as the user fills in the stop. Third, the snippets have access to TextMate environment variables such as current scope, current line number, or author name, and also have the ability to run inline shell scripts.

Commands

Like many other programmers’ text editors, TextMate allows users to execute shell scripts with keyboard shortcuts. Because TextMate commands read a shebang line to determine how they should run, it is possible to write commands in any scripting language, including bash, Ruby, Python, Perl, and AppleScript. The text of the document can be piped to stdin, and scripts can access document state via special environment variables. Several output options are possible, such as displaying a WebKit view in a separate window, replacing the selected text, or inserting text as a snippet. Using AppleScript, TextMate commands can interact with other Mac programs.

Bundles

TextMate language grammars, snippets, macros, commands, and templates can be grouped into “bundles” of functionality. Any snippet, macro, or command can be executed by pressing a keyboard shortcut, by typing a particular word and then pressing the “tab” key (so-called “tab triggers”), or by selecting the command from a menu. Tab triggers are particularly useful; the combination of tab triggers and snippets greatly eases coding in verbose languages, or languages with commonly-typed patterns.

Snippets, macros, and commands can be limited to a particular scope, so that for instance the “close html tag” command does not work in a python script, freeing up that keyboard shortcut to be used for something else. This allows individual languages, and even individual scopes, to override built-in commands such as “Reformat Paragraph” with more specialized versions. Even common key such as the return key and spacebar can be overridden to make coding seamless.

36 bundles ship with TextMate, but a Subversion repository contains 121 bundles, for everything from Markdown to blogging to MIPS assembly language. A MediaWiki bundle has recently been added.

Project Management

Several documents or folders can be opened at once in a TextMate project window, which provides a drawer along its side listing file and folder names, and a series of tabs across the top. Search and replace can be undertaken across an entire project, and commands can interact with the selected files or folders in the drawer. Bundles for CVS, Subversion, darcs, and other revision control systems allow TextMate to manage versioned code.

Other features

TextMate has several other notable features:

• Folding code sections can be used to hide areas of a document not currently being edited, for a more compact view of code structure or to avoid distraction. The sections to be folded can be selected by hand, or the structure of the document itself can be used to determine foldings.
• Regular-expression–based search and replace speeds complicated text manipulations.
• A function pop-up provides a list of sections or functions in the current document.
• Clipboard history allows users to cut many sections of text at once, and then paste them.
• A column editing mode trivializes adding the same text to several rows of text, and is very useful for manipulating tabular data.
• A WebKit-based HTML view window shows live updates as an HTML document is edited.

Limitations

TextMate does have a few limitations:

• There is no support for variable-width or wide fonts, meaning that languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and others are not really supported, as their characters are wider than latin characters.
• There is no right-to-left support for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.
• Large (many megabyte) files can slow TextMate considerably. Some other editors have better support for large files.
• TextMate has no built-in support for (S)FTP, though such support is planned for TextMate 2.0.
• Because TextMate is not tightly coupled to a scripting language, as Emacs is to elisp, it is impossible for users to have complete control over the behavior of some built-in commands such as those which indent sections of text or those which move columns around; however, almost every useful action can be accomplished with TextMate’s macros and commands. Allan Odgaard explained his thoughts on the subject in an email to the TextMate mailing list.
• No built-in HTML validator — because TextMate uses the W3C validator for HTML validation, users must be online to validate HTML.
• No support for split views

Easter Eggs

On Halloween 2006, TextMate’s program icon changed to a spooky jack-o’-lantern instead of the standard purple gear. A “Halloween” theme was created for HTML previews, and a spider web showed up in empty project windows.

Community

Though TextMate is not an open source application, like many open source products it has a large and active community of users, dozens of whom contribute to the bundle subversion repository. The TextMate wiki has many hints and tips, feature suggestions, and links to external resources. The mailing list has medium traffic, but with a relatively high signal-to-noise ratio. A ticket system exists for filing bug reports and feature requests, and an IRC channel (##textmate) is usually full of vibrant chatter.

Though TextMate users write code in many programming languages, TextMate’s Ruby and Ruby on Rails support is notable because most of Rails’ core developers use Mac OS X and TextMate, including David Heinemeier Hansson, Rails’ creator.

Versions for other platforms

Allan has received numerous requests for Microsoft Windows and Linux version of TextMate, but has publicly stated that he has no interest in making such ports. At least two attempts at TextMate-like editors for Windows are under way, one of which works with existing TextMate bundles (see section on E, below).

E Text Editor

Main article: E (text editor)

E is a text editor originally released for Windows which places emphasis on its support for the TextMate bundles.

In early August 2007, an announcement was posted on the official website's blog section about the release of a stable version 1.0 and the end of the beta period. The same post also pre-empted repeated requests for a Linux version, announcing that one was in the works: "And before I get drowned in requests again. Yes, a linux [sic] version is in the works."

Notes

File:TextMate-original-icon.png

Original TextMate icon.

Bibliography

• Gray, James Edward II (2007). Textmate: Power Editing for the Mac. Pragmatic Bookshelf. ISBN 097873923X. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

External links

• TextMate Homepage
  • TextMate Blog
  • TextMate Wiki
  • TextMate Manual
• TextMate topic page at 43folders.com, a popular Mac productivity blog.
• podcast interview at the TextMate booth at the Macworld 2007 expo, by PodTech.net