TextMate How-To: Over 20 fast and furious timesaving recipes for using TextMate efficiently and effectively with this book and ebook.

To configure Line Numbers:

To configure Soft Tabs:

To configure Soft Wrap:

To configure the Show Invisibles option:

To configure Check Spelling as You Type:

Selecting Highlight current line, Show right margin indicator, and Highlight right margin:

Now, let's go through why you may want to use these settings:

Included with the TextMate application is a command-line tool, which can be used in Terminal to open files. In addition, it's quite important to learn the keyboard shortcuts, which will help you do things quickly and efficiently. However, in order to learn the shortcuts, it is vital to learn what the keyboard symbols look like.

Enhanced Terminal Usage

When you run TextMate for the first time, you will be prompted to install the shell command mate. Installing this tool will allow you to open files into TextMate from Terminal, for example, mate example.html or mate project/. There is more on opening files in the Traversing files recipe.

You can open the install dialog at any time from the menu; select Help | Terminal Usage.

Download the ZIP file at https://github.com/ryanb/textmate-themes. This is shown in the following screenshot:

Once the ZIP file is downloaded, extract it and double-click on the theme files which have the .tmTheme extension to install and switch to the theme. The theme files are shown in the following screenshot:

Made famous by Ryan Bates' screencasts (http://www.railscasts.com), RailsCasts is a great and aesthetically pleasing theme that can be used for a number of languages, including PHP, Ruby, HTML, and JavaScript.

You will notice that the RailsCasts theme ZIP file contains two versions. The one labeled ryan-light.tmTheme has a white background. The original has a dark background and is also the version used for most of the screenshots in this guide. Whichever you choose to use is purely your preference, but there is no harm in installing and trying both.

You can switch themes by going to File | Preferences (Command + ,) and selecting the Fonts & Colors tab, as shown in the following screenshot:

In case the included or RailsCasts theme doesn't adhere to your particular tastes, there are many other popular themes available.

Solarized theme

Another freely available theme is called Solarized, and can be found at https://github.com/deplorableword/textmate-solarized. The Solarized theme is stated to be specifically useful on calibrated and non-calibrated displays alike, as well as in a variety of lighting conditions. Since the theme consists of a simple color palette, it's easily translatable to terminal emulations and therefore highly versatile between applications.

You can find out more about the Solarized theme, including themes for additional applications, at http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized.

The two available options to quickly navigate to the text are as follows:

Go to Line... (Command + L) is very useful for situations where you know the precise line you want to edit. For example, when you're debugging some code and the error message code gives the problem line number.

Go to Symbol... (Shift + Command + T) is mainly used for programming languages such as JavaScript and PHP, where functions or methods are defined in the document. When this is invoked, a window will appear with the names of the functions or methods available, as shown in the following screenshot:

Start entering the method name and it will match and filter the list based on what you enter. Go to Symbol... (Shift + Command + T) is extremely helpful for long documents of code where scrolling and navigating line by line is unreasonable.

You can also open the function pop up in the status menu (located at the bottom of the document window) to display all of the functions or methods in your document. This is shown in the following screenshot:

Along with the quick navigation shortcuts, there are also ways to move the cursor and scroll the document easily without using the mouse.

TextMate provides the following text conversions:

Most of these conversions should be self-explanatory. Some text conversions are shown in the following screenshot:

Tabs to Spaces (or Spaces to Tabs) is helpful if you decide later on to change to or from Soft Tabs. It's also useful if you want to play a practical joke on a colleague who is vehemently against either soft or hard tabs.

The different options used to move and align text are as follows:

Moving selections: When you are moving a selection of text, it is just as if you are dragging the text around with your mouse cursor (see Moving text with the mouse/track pad in the There's more… section). Don't be afraid. As you'll see in the following screenshot, it will not overwrite the line you are moving your selection to:

Aligning text: An important thing to note is that the alignment is based on the Wrap Column size (select View | Wrap Column).

Since TextMate is a full-featured GUI text editor, you may also move text with the mouse or track pad. Plus, we'll look at a tip for moving entire lines up or down.

Since this task is most useful with a list or multiple columns of text, you'll want to start out with something like the following:

The steps to manipulate multiple lines and multiple columns of text are as follows:

Though the column manipulation is mainly used for data organization, the Edit all lines in a selection option has some very practical use cases for editing code. For example, if you have a list of items in HTML but don't want to copy and paste list item tags (that is, <li>) for each line, you can use the following set of keystrokes to quickly surround all of the items in <li> tags.

Select all of the lines, press Command + Option + A, and start typing the opening tag (<li>), followed by Command + right arrow (to move to the end of the line), and type the closing tag (</li>):

The different Find options are explained as follows:

The Find dialog box has some very helpful options. These are as follows:

There are some extended features of the find functionality that are useful if you do a lot of searching or if you need to find and/or replace multiple lines.

Expanded Find and Replace

If you need some more room to fully view your Find and Replace strings or regular expressions, you can click on the downward-facing triangle underneath the Σ button:

Also, if you need to insert a literal tab or return, hold down the Option key while pressing Tab or return.

To use folding, you'll need to make sure it's enabled. You can toggle it by going to View | Gutter | Foldings from the menu.

Folding actually happens automatically as long as you have the proper language selected via the status bar pop-up:

As with most of TextMate's functions, learning the keyboard shortcuts for folding is key to working with your document.

But, you can also use the mouse and click the arrows to fold the code, as shown in the following screenshot:

It's important that your document is set to the correct language for folding and other features, such as bundle snippets and shortcuts, to work properly. You can quickly change languages using keyboard shortcuts.

Language keyboard shortcuts

Notice the keyboard shortcuts next to the language selection pop-up. These can be very helpful in quickly switching languages (for example, between HTML and PHP or HTML and JavaScript).

Sometimes the document is coded in two languages (for example, HTML and PHP) and you need certain bundle functionality, depending on the setting (bundles will be discussed further in the Bundles recipe).

You can use the following methods to bookmark a line:

A star indicator in the gutter signifies when a line has been bookmarked.

If you would like to use the drag-and-drop to dock method, you will need to copy the TextMate application to the dock.

If you would like to use the command-line method, you will need to install the mate command-line executable, which you are prompted to do during the first run of TextMate. You may also install it from the File menu (select Help | Terminal Usage…) at any time. See the Configuring TextMate section explained earlier in the chapter, for more information.

Let's cover the typical ways to create projects in TextMate:

Projects allow you to quickly work with multiple files. Once created, you can quickly search for and open files (see the Traversing Files section), create new files, organize files into groups, create project-specific shell variables, and more.

Once you open a project, you can easily save it by selecting File | Save Project (Command + Control + S) or by selecting File | Save Project As… (Command + Control + Shift + S). The latter will allow you to rename a previously saved project.

Let's cover how to exclude files or folders from your projects, as well as why you may want to do so.

Excluding files

Sometimes excluding files will speed up search time, for example, if your project includes long logfiles with the extension .log. Unfortunately, the process to exclude files requires knowledge of regular expressions, which is a bit out of the scope of this book.

However, you can find where to exclude files by going to File | Preferences (Command + ,), navigating to the Advanced tab, and selecting the Folder References section. There you will edit the File Pattern and Folder Pattern fields:

Taking the example I gave previously regarding excluding any files with the extension .log, the File Pattern field would look as follows:

!(/\.(?!htaccess)[^/]*|\.(tmproj|o|pyc)|/Icon\r|/svn-commit(\.[2-9])?\.tmp|\.log)$

Note the |\.log at the end. If you aren't familiar with regular expressions, note that this says to exclude files that end in .log (along with excluding .htaccess, files ending in .tmproj, .o, .pyc, and so on).

Open or create a new project with multiple files. Clicking on any of the files in the Project Drawer will open those files in new tabs.

Navigating through the tabs with the keyboard shortcuts will speed up your editing time. Once you learn these shortcuts, you can quickly go back and forth between two (or three, or four, or more) files you need to reference or edit.

Organizing your tabs is important for an efficient workflow. This includes moving tabs around, closing tabs, and viewing the overflow of opened tabs.

Moving tabs

You can move between tabs very easily by clicking and holding the mouse cursor on the tab and dragging it to a new location.

Showing other open tabs

When you have more tabs open than the document window can show, you'll notice some double-right arrows. Clicking on these will drop down a menu with the rest of the open tabs, as shown in the following screenshot:

If you navigate through the tabs using Next File Tab (Command + } or Command + Option + right arrow) and Previous Tab (Command + { or Command + Option + left arrow), you will navigate to the unseen tabs as well.

Open or create a project with multiple files.

You may navigate to files within your project in two main ways:

The Project Drawer menu should be self-explanatory as it's simply a list of the files and folders in a project.

If you already know the name of the file you want to open, the Go To File... (Command + T) option saves a great amount of time. When you use this option, a pop-up box will appear with a list of the files in the project, as shown in the following screenshot:

Start typing to filter the files by what you enter in the search box. Press Tab and then the up or down arrow to navigate your selection to the file you wish to open. Press Enter or Return to open the file in the document window and close the Go to File... pop-up box.

You can toggle the Project Drawer at any time as well as specify which file extensions you want to open in TextMate.

Treating files as binary

When you open projects, unless you exclude certain files, TextMate will also pull in any images or executables. Though you may not mean to, you can open these files in the document window.

If you'd rather not have TextMate read these files when you click on them (usually by accident), then you can right-click on the files in the Project Drawer and select Treat Files with ".xxx" Extension as Binary. An example of this is shown in the following screenshot:

You can undo this by right-clicking on the file and selecting Treat Files with ".xxx" Extension as Text.

Open or create a project with multiple files.

To pull up the Find in Project dialog window, from the menu, select Edit | Find | Find in Project… (Command + Shift + F).

The Find function works in very much the same way as Find in a File (Command + F). However, it will return the locations of all of the occurrences of your find in every file of your project, except for the binary files.

Let's look at how to hide extraneous find results and speed up searching in large projects.

Hiding find occurrences

If you get a lot of results back and want to hide some occurrences to make it easier to replace selected occurrences, you can fold or collapse those results by clicking on the triangle next to the file, as shown in the following screenshot:

Installing GetBundles is much like installing bundles manually, which we will go over later in this task. It's more complicated than installing themes and requires you to use the Terminal application. The steps to install are as follows:

Once you open the GetBundles bundle, you can install any bundle by selecting one or more bundles and clicking the Install Bundles button:

The GetBundles bundle has a simple interface that lists bundles and their descriptions with the search option, filters, and tools:

Some of the features of GetBundles are explained in the following section:

If you'd like to install bundles manually, you can check out the source files directly from Macromate's subversion repository.

If you want to dig deeper into learning more about a particular bundle, Bundle Editor is the place to go.

Exploring bundles

You can filter and view many other bundle items, such as commands and macros, in the Bundle Editor (select Bundles | Bundle Editor | Show Bundle Editor or Command + Option + Control + B). If you want to know how a particular bundle item works, find it here. The Bundle Editor window is shown in the following screenshot:

As you may have surmised, the TODO bundle will search through your current document or project for the TODO, FixMe, changed, and RADAR keywords. Note that the keyword is not case sensitive and can be followed by a whitespace character, a comma, or a colon. This is shown in the following screenshot:

To search through multiple files or folders in your project, you need to select those files and/or folders in the Project Drawer menu. For example, to search the entire project select the top-level folder and click on Show TODO List (Control + Shift + T).

You may customize the TODO bundle to suit your color and pattern preferences as well as add more markers. We'll also cover the Tasks bundle, which will help you create well-formatted to-do lists.

Setting other preferences

You can choose what words count as TODO keywords. To do this, go to TODO Preferences via the File menu by selecting Bundles | TODO | Preferences. This window is shown in the following screenshot:

You may also change the color and regular expression pattern of the keywords, making this bundle quite versatile.

Tasks bundle

If you love to-do lists, a similar bundle called Tasks is also available for installation via GetBundles. The Tasks bundle allows you to easily create simple to-do items (Ins or fn + return on laptops to create a task) and mark them as complete (Command + D). An example of a to-do list is shown in the following screenshot:

Install the Zen Coding bundle via GetBundles.

In order to expand a Zen Coding abbreviation or alias, you need to use the keyboard shortcut Command + E, or from the menu select Bundles | Zen Coding | Expand Abbreviation.

For example, div#main will expand to <div id="main"></div>

Here are some more examples:

On the Zen Coding website, at http://code.google.com/p/zen-coding/, Zen Coding is defined as an editor plugin for high-speed HTML, XML, and XSL (or any other structured code format) coding and editing. The core of this plugin is a powerful abbreviation engine, which allows you to expand expressions—similar to CSS selectors—into HTML code.

Zen Coding can greatly expedite HTML development. There are some other helpful actions included in this bundle:

There are more actions, so definitely explore all of them. A handy cheat sheet is available at http://code.google.com/p/zen-coding/wiki/CheatSheets.

The purpose of covering Zen Coding in this book is to highlight the power of TextMate as a full-featured coding tool. It will save you a lot of time if you do a lot of HTML and CSS coding.

Install the Blogging and Hyperlink Helper bundles via GetBundles.

The Hyperlink Helper option:

The Blogging option:

The Hyperlink Helper option is quite useful when you want to quickly insert references into your documents without having to go back and forth between your browser, search for the address, and then paste it into your document.

It also has some further functionality, such as searching for word definition links in Wikipedia and more advanced Yahoo! search engine searches.

The Help documentation for the Blogging bundle is quite helpful, so you should read it if you have any issues. From the menu select Bundles | Blogging | Help.

Install the Markdown and Textile Bundles via GetBundles.

It's as simple as selecting the file format from the document status menu. The following screenshot is an example of using the Markdown bundle:

The following screenshot is an example of using the Textile bundle:

Though both the Markdown and Textile bundles make it easier to utilize these lightweight markup languages, the real power lies within the syntax. Both bundles provide easy access to the documentation with the keyboard shortcut Control + H. The following screenshot is an example of the Markdown documentation:

The following screenshot is an example of the Textile documentation:

With Markdown, if you are currently making edits, you may instead see a tooltip with helpful instructions to speed up your editing. This is shown in the following screenshot:

You can find out more about these formats and their syntaxes at the following sites:

For Markdown use http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/, and for Textile use http://redcloth.org/hobix.com/textile/.

You may be asking yourself, "Should I use Textile or Markdown?" The answer to this question largely depends on the project at hand.

Macros are best used for keystrokes that you keep repeating. In the previous example, I made a macro out of a common pattern I use in PHP development (WordPress, CakePHP, and so on) to print out a string, which typically includes a variable (for example, for debugging purposes).

Editing your macro requires a little bit of XML knowledge, but it is easily done using TextMate to open the bundle source files.

The steps to execute shell commands directly from the current document are as follows:

The example in this task uses Jeffery Way's Prefixr (http://www.prefixr.com/), which is a fantastic utility to make the CSS cross-browser compatible quickly and easily.

From the previous example, when you use the keyboard shortcut, the selected text (the input) will be sent to Prefixr via cURL (http://curl.haxx.se/), which is a command-line utility that transfers data from a variety of protocols, such as HTTP. The returned data (the output) will then replace the selected text.

Let's also look at how to execute commands from the document editor. Plus, we'll find out how to set environment variables to aid in development.

Executing lines and inserting results

Another way to execute commands in TextMate is to execute the current line and return the results. This can be done from the menu (select Text | Execute Selection Inserting Result) or the keyboard shortcut Control + R:

More on environment variables

In this section's example, we made use of the TextMate environment variable $TM_SELECTED_TEXT. There are a number of other similar environment variables that can be used for commands and more complex bundle operations. A full list of the variables can be found on Macromate's TextMate wiki:

http://manual.macromates.com/en/environment_variables.html

You may also wish to utilize static shell variables (select Preferences | Advanced | Shell Variables), which you can use to declare usernames and passwords to your MySQL database or services such as Shopify (http://www.shopify.com/). The Shell Variables window is shown in the following screenshot:

You can also specify shell variables at the project level by clicking on the information icon in the Project Drawer menu, as shown in the following screenshot:

The Project Information window is shown in the following screenshot, where usernames and passwords of services such as MySQL can be set: