My best TextMate
My best TextMate
I code a lot of HTML being a web designer. As I sat there at work one afternoon working on some site templates, Dreamweaver crashed for the nth time that day. When I got tired of Dreamweaver crapping out I used Bare Bones' TextWrangler, I actually find I produce better HTML when I have to type / look at the pages in code. It encourages me to be tidier. But typing in repeatedly gets boring pretty fast. So I decided a quick google was in order to find some alternatives to TextWrangler.
The application that caught my eye was TextMate. I've been using it for a couple of days now and I love it. I'm fairly certain I've only scraped the surface of this app but what I've seen so far has me hooked. One of the cool features is the ability to set up text snippets that have an activation word. For example if I don't want to type in the HTML code to display an image I can assign that code to the string img. Typing img and pressing the tab key would then expand the img to:
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<img xsrc="" width="" height="" alt="" />
But, not only does it save me from typing in all that code, there are placeholders that you can add to the snippets so that when the img code has expanded onto the screen you can then tab through the bits you might want to edit, the src, width, etc.
TextMate will do loads more, executing commands on the command line and feeding the results back into a file, it makes reading man pages so much nicer when you can scroll or print them out easily. Then there's bookmarks so you can find your way back to a specific point in a file. I could go on but I'd rather go and edit some code :)