TextMate

Articles for people looking to transition from TextMate to Vim.

Arthur Debert (Stimuli): “Hello VIM, or quitting TextMate cold turkey”

In my last post I’ve mentioned my way through VIM. Quiting TextMate cold turnkey wasn’t easy. But fear not: there are a bunch of plugins that will make it a breeze.

Jeff Ober (Artful Code): “From TextMate to Vim”

TextMate is an excellent editor, but it is beginning to show its age. It has a few squeaky wheels that have yet to be oiled, and it looks as though the author may be getting bogged down in the minutiae of his next release. With the next version apparently due sometime after the colonization of Mars, it seemed an auspicious time to try out another editor.

Jamis Buck (the buck blogs here): “Coming home to Vim”

Fast forward three years. The vim landscape is different now. There is actually a Mac-friendly GUI version of vim now, MacVim, which actually looks like it belongs on OS X. Vim 7 supports UI tabs, and a much more powerful auto-completion mechanism than before. And plugins like rails.vim and fuzzyfinder.vim mean that TextMate no longer has a corner on powerful project navigation.

On Reddit: “Ask /r/vim: How do you work with a project in vim?”

What I love about TextMate is that I can open a directory and it will list its hierarchy in a drawer, making it very easy to navigate files. Add to that the wonderful Cmd+T which incrementally lets me search for files within this hierarchy and quickly open one in a new tab.

I’m looking for something like this in vim. Or I’m wondering how other people solve the problem of working on a project which requires quickly opening different files and navigating within a hierarchy?

Also useful for those switching from Mac to Linux. ;)

I always forget about the system_profiler command in Mac OS X. It gives you an exhaustive list of hardware and system details for the machine you’re on — or a remote server if you’re logged in via SSH.

It’s the CLI equivalent of selecting “About This Mac” under the Apple menu, then clicking on the “More Info…” button. With that in mind, you’ll probably want to pipe the command to a pager like less, so you can go screen-by-screen with leisurely space-bar taps:

system_profiler | less

will do the trick. Or, if you have a GUI editor that includes a CLI command (like TextMate),

system_profiler | mate

Of course you could always save the details directly to a text file with

system_profiler > profiler.txt

Alex Young posted “Vim for TextMate fans” a couple of years back, in which he ponders how to get the best of both worlds:

I’ve used vim a lot over the years, mainly because I spent a long time using Linux and it was there so I used it. The choice was obvious: vim or vi were on almost every machine I had access to, and worked excellently both locally and remotely. Once I’d learnt the basics I was set, I knew enough to get my work done.

Then I found TextMate for Mac OS. The immediacy of TextMate made it easy to get started with, and it has many excellent features. The problem is, I’m not always using a Mac. But you know who’ll follow me around to every platform I use? Good old vim! So I started thinking, how could I make vim feel more like TextMate?

Check out his screencast for more.

Thu Sep 20 12:23:36 PDT 2007

Tracked down an easy method to insert the current date (timestamp) into a Vim document:

:r !date

Producing:

Thu Sep 20 12:24:50 PDT 2007

http://princ3.wordpress.com/2007/08/27/insert-current-date-in-vim/

UPDATE: 2008/11/08

Found another Vim method, slightly easier:

!!date

Should probably set up a single key command for that, maybe an F key.

Thu Sep 20 15:36:40 PDT 2007

Within TextMate, short of creating an internal command, the easiest way is to use the Text > Execute Line and Replace with Result and then using the /bin/date utility by simply typing date and then the ctrl-option-r shortcut

OK, since when could you column-select in MarsEdit? Open up a post to edit with some text in it. Move your cursor over the words: the usual text-selection bar. Now hold down Option, and crosshairs appear. Select at will.

It doesn’t seem to want to let you edit all of the selection as it does in, say, TextMate, so I wonder if it’s on purpose or not, or if it’s still to come. (See update below.)

The other thing I figured out is, while using the Edit in TextMate command (and this goes for any app enabled with that command), you can select a portion of the text field contents to edit, rather than bringing the entire block in. Handy for smaller edits.

Update: just noticed it in a Journler field as well, so I’m guessing it’s an artifact of new Cocoa text fields?