Textmate 2 Tips

One of the big changes in TM2 is that you can no longer create new files from the Project Drawer's right click menu. This was a handy feature that I honestly miss.

Fortunately, there is a work around though it's somewhat less intuitive.

Create a new file/tab by hitting ⌥⌘N or choosing File > New Tab from the menu.

Select the folder that you want to save the file in from the File Browser/Project Drawer:

Here I have the stylesheets folder selected.

Save the new tab ("untitled" in the screenshot above) by hitting ⌘S or choosing File > Save from the menu.

The file dialog will come up with the folder you chose in step 2 selected.

The save dialog with your folder selected.

Give your new file a name and hit Enter or click Save and the file will be right where you want it!

There it is.

Development continues. This release allows you to disable the functionality that hides the tab bar when only one file is open. Disabling that auto hide makes Textmate 2's functionality like that of Textmate 1.

2011-12-18

Introduced callback.application.did-activate and callback.application.did-deactivate as two new semantic classes. A command with this class will be executed when the application gain/lose focus. The scope selector is matched against the "current scope" of the visible document (in each window). This allows creating a command with "Save" set to "Modified Documents" and thereby recreating TextMate 1.x's ability to save modified documents on lost focus.

The approach in 2.0 also allows to run some code, for example reloading the currently open browsers, and it can be scoped e.g. to text.html to only have the "save on lost focus" enabled when editing HTML files - alternatively one can introduce a custom scope like attr.save-on-deactivate and set that for specific projects via a scopeAttributes setting in .tm_properties.

Tab bar can be made always visible: defaults write com.macromates.TextMate.preview disableTabBarCollapsing -bool YES.

Fix issue with indented soft wrap having the prefix string wider than the wrap column.

Fix issue with selection sent to commands needing entire document (e.g. ⌘R for Ruby, Python, etc.).

Fix issue with ⌃⇥ not always working to move focus to file browser.

In this article will discuss:

Using multiple carets with the mouse

Changes to column selection

Using multiple carets with Find

Here’s a great tip from eirkeirkeirk :

 I noticed the ⌘⌥A command was gone from TM2. But I figured out a way to replicate it.

- Select all the lines you want to edit

- Turn it into a column selection (tap ⌥)

- Then ⌘→ to move all the carets to the end of each line

This is actually better than the previous incarnation because:

- You can actually see the carets, where as before you were typing blindly

- Each caret acts smarter. So you can do things like  ⌥← to move back one word in each line.

I was delighted to see a significant update to the alpha released earlier today, with some much anticipated features/settings added. The big items here are the ability to disable text aliasing, the ability to put the file-browser on the right side of the window, and the option for HTML output to have its own window. See below for the complete release notes:

2011–12–16

HTML output can open in its own window: defaults write com.macromates.TextMate.preview htmlOutputPlacement window.

Anti-alias can be disabled: defaults write com.macromates.TextMate.preview disableAntiAlias -bool YES.

File browser can be placed on the right side: defaults write com.macromates.TextMate.preview fileBrowserPlacement right.

With multiple carets, ⌘-clicking one of them removes it (i.e. it’s a toggle).

Carriage returns (<CR>) on the general clipboard are converted to regular newlines when pasting.

Rename help book to “TextMate 2” which fixes issues where Help → TextMate Help showed TextMate 1.5’s help book.

TextMate 1.x and 2.0 can now both run at the same time.

Setting TM_HG and TM_GIT in Preferences is no longer eclipsed by the default properties (which set them to point at /opt/local/bin).

A big thanks to macromates for this list of key commands for use when the file browser is in focus:

⌘⇡ Go to Enclosing Folder ⌘⇣ Open ⌘⇠ Go Back ⌘⇢ Go Forward ↩ Rename ␣ QuickLook ⇧⌘N New Folder ⌥⌘N New Tab ⌘D Duplicate ⌘⌫ Delete ⇧⌘C Go to Computer ⇧⌘H Go to Home ⇧⌘D Go to Desktop ⇧⌘G Go to Folder… ⇧⌘F Search Selected Folder ⌘C Copy Path ⌘O Open ⌘[ Go Back ⌘] Go Forward

As well as these mouse commands:

Single-click icon to open (or double click name). Hold ⌥ when single-clicking a package (e.g. tmBundle) to descend into the package. Hold ⌥ to “close other” if clicking a regular (text) file.

You can access a "Smart Folder" from the top bar of the folder drawer by clicking on the purple folder with a gear on it. This folder gives you a view of 'Uncommitted Changes' and 'Untracked Files' in your project*.

You can select files you want to commit using the Git bundle's "Commit..." command (makes it easier if assign a shortcut to this menu item — maybe ⌘⌥⌃C — though you can use this tip to find one that doesn't conflict).

You can also access a diff viewer from here which opens within textmate itself. Not ideal compared to GitX or Github, but for small commits it's nice to not have to switch away from Textmate.

Here’s a great tip from Allan:

 ⌃⌘T to bring up the ‘Select bundle item’ dialog. By default, you can search by bundle item title, but if you hit ⌘4, you can switch to key equivalent—meaning you can just type the shortcut to find its bundle item.

For instance, if you’d like to find the Comment Line/Selection bundle item, you can use: ⌃⌘T + ⌘4 + ⌘/.

(From the built-in help)

Find History

Just like clipboard history: ⌃⌥⌘F.

In the ⌘+T (Go To File) dialog, you can append :line or :line:column when specifying a file to jump to. This is particularly useful for console errors that return line/column positions in long blocks of code.