To install the GitHub bundle do the following:

$ sudo gem install git
$ cd ~/"Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/"
$ git clone git://github.com/drnic/github-tmbundle.git "GitHub.tmbundle"
$ osascript -e 'tell app "TextMate" to reload bundles'

BBEdit now handles the (badly chosen, IMO) “txmt:” URL scheme. This allows properly formed “txmt:” URLs generated by the Ruby On Rails “FootNotes” plug-in (and some others) to open files in BBEdit and (optionally) select a requested line and column. (NB: If the system doesn’t correctly recognize BBEdit as an allowable handler for such URLs, RCDefaultApp is a good tool for adjusting the bindings.)

Typed through gritted teeth no doubt. Though you have to give Rich credit—it’s real dedication to his users to swallow his pride and adopt an emerging standard instigated by a competitor. From the TextMate manual:

The txmt URL scheme allows you to open files in TextMate via hyperlinks found for example in HTML documents (anchors). These can refer to local files which can be useful when:

Using commands with HTML output that indicate errors/warnings with the current document, or refer to other documents in your project.

If you are generating a set of web-pages from simpler (text) files you can have these link to the original text files, so that when you are inspecting the generated result (in a browser) you can quickly edit the source of each page by following the txmt:-link.

The URL scheme is txmt: and currently has one command named open. This command takes up to three arguments:

• url — the (file) URL to open (e.g. url=file://~/.bash_profile), if this is left out, the current document is targeted.
• line — the line on which the caret should be placed after opening the file (e.g. line=11).
• column — the column on which the caret should be placed after opening the file (e.g. column=3).

Gloating done, the scratch pad feature also looks interesting. So if you are still using the text editor that doesn’t suck™, you should check out the new release.

It is hosted at GitHub, so git users can get theme with git clone git://github.com/PhilGeek/clear-pond.git. Other wise, it can be downloaded here.

When can we expect TextMate 2 to be released? Here is what Alan Odgaard has to say in the TextMate 2 FAQ:

[…] there is no ETA, and I won’t speak about timing before I am certain I can provide an (alpha/beta) release within the next month – because really, the more I say, the more people ask, and having to answer the same questions over and over again is (for me) mentally exhausting. So put TM 2.0 up there with Duke Nukem Forever and be positively surprised the day it is released :)

The release of footage of Duke Nukem Forever has prompted the following query on irc:

ph^: allan: Now that Duke Nukem forever has released a new gameplay-video … :p

Well, no official word from Allan yet, but Peter Haza (aka ph^) shares some insights into the state of TextMate 2 development in this interesting post.

Syntax coloring is a feature of some text editors that displays different parts of the text in different colors depending upon the logical category of the text. This makes it easier to write structured texts whether these be code or markup. … Syntax coloring makes the logical structure of your document visually apparent and hence the document easier to read.

Given its cognitive utility, it would be nice to use syntax coloring with the occasional code snippets displayed here. There are a number of WordPress plugins that provide syntax coloring. The fact that I use Michel Fortin’s PHP Markdown Extra posed one important limitation. PHP Markdown Extra would interfere with those plugins that used special markup. Fortunately, some plugins, like WP-Syntax, use a variant of HTML markup that counts as valid Markdown. WP-Syntax uses the GeSHI syntax engine that supports a large number of languages. The results, out of the box, were not that attractive and modifications, while possible, were beyond my ken. WP-Syntax Colorizer is another WordPress plugin that makes such modifications easier, but after a number of tries, I was unable to come up with a color scheme that worked as well as I liked (my fault entirely, I am sure).

Part of my dissatisfaction had to do with the high quality of syntax coloring provided by my favored text editor, TextMate. I just didn’t feel comfortable settling for less. Fortunately, for me, TextMate can export your coloring theme as CSS and can export selections as HTML. These two posts, here and here, explained how to exploit these features with your WordPress blog to get TextMate themes in your code snippets. Below is an example. The theme is Twilight, and the code is the initial portion of the generated CSS.

/* Stylesheet generated from TextMate theme
 *
 * Twilight
 * 
 *
 */

/* Mostly to improve view within the TextMate HTML viewer */
body {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}

pre.textmate-source {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0 0 0 2px;
    font-family: Consolas, DroidSansMono, Inconsolata, DejaVuSansMono, monospace;
    font-size: 10px;
    line-height: 1.3em;
    word-wrap: break-word;
    white-space: pre;
    white-space: pre-wrap;
    white-space: -moz-pre-wrap;
    white-space: -o-pre-wrap;
}

pre.textmate-source {
    color: #F8F8F8;
    background-color: #141414;
}

pre.textmate-source .linenum {
    width: 75px;
    padding: 0.1em 1em 0.2em 0;
    color: #888;
    background-color: #eee;
}

The results are not completely faithful—TextMate’s scopes, on which its themes are based, cannot be fully represented in CSS. Nonetheless, I am much happier now. Expect to see proper syntax coloring from now on.

sudo gem install git

To install GitHub.bundle:

cd ~/"Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/"
git clone git://github.com/drnic/github-tmbundle.git "GitHub.tmbundle"

If TextMate is running, execute the following line:

osascript -e 'tell app "TextMate" to reload bundles'

TextMate and GitHub: Show the current file in GitHub from Dr Nic on Vimeo.

require 'time'
lines = `git log --pretty=format:%ai`
times = lines.map { |l| Time.parse l }

dots = []
0.upto(7) { |wday|
  0.upto(23) { |hour|
    dots << [hour, wday, times.find_all { |t| t.hour == hour && t.wday == wday }.size]
  }
}

max = dots.map { |h,w,c| c }.max

puts "http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=800x300&chds=-1,24,-1,7,0,#{max}&chf=bg,s,efefef&chd=t:#{dots.transpose.map { |c| c.join(",") }.join("|")}&chxt=x,y&chm=o,333333,1,1.0,25.0&chxl=0:||12am|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12pm|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11||1:||Sun|Mon|Tue|Wed|Thr|Fri|Sat|&cht=s"

Save this in a file called gitlog.rb. The script generates a URL that calls the Google Chart API. Assuming that gitlog.rb is in ~/bin (put it wherever you like), open the Bundle Editor and create the following TextMate command:

URL=`ruby ~/bin/gitlog.rb`

echo "<meta http-equiv='Refresh' content='0;
    URL=$URL'>"

with the following settings:

• Save: Nothing
• Input: None
• Output: Show as HTML
• Activation: Key Equivalent ⌃⇧G

Calling the command produces the following chart that plots the number of commits you made per hour to your Git repository:

It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.

Changes is out of beta with a 1.0 release. Changes allows you to compare diretories and files and is Leopard only taking advantage of Core Animation and Quick Look. Offering editor support for BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextMate, and Xcode and version control integration for Subversion, CVS, Perforce, Mercurial, Git, Bazaar, and Darcs, Changes is shaping up to be a powerful alternative to FileMerge. Changes also has a number of advanced features such as a command line utility, a plug-in architecture, and F-Script support. A cool hybrid app. Ian Baird of Skorpiostech has been hard at work and was very responsive during the beta phase. (He addressed in a day a serious performance issue that arose in comparing text files with long lines that I reported.) So if you try Changes and like what you see, show him some love and buy a license.

1. the message URI
2. the message id wrapped in angle brackets

Message URLs can take any of the following syntactic forms:

message:%3cmessage_id%3e 
message://%3cmessage_id%3e 
message:<message_id> 
message://<message_id>

Both Liyanage and Gruber provide applescripts for retrieving the message id of a given email saving the message URL to the pasteboard. Gruber’s applescript is as follows:

tell application "Mail"
    set _sel to get selection
    set _links to {}
    repeat with _msg in _sel
        set _messageURL to "message://%3c" & _msg's message id & "%3e"
        set end of _links to _messageURL
    end repeat
    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to return
    set the clipboard to (_links as string)
end tell

When saved in

~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail/

it will appear in the script menu when Mail.app is in focus. Just select the target mail and run the script and the mail URL will be in your pasteboard ready to paste into your textfile. And if you are a keyboard fanatic who eschews the mouse wherever possible, you can use Quicksilver to run the applescript. If your text file is in markdown format, simply enclose the message URL in angle brackets.

Having the ability to link to pertinent emails really increases the usefulness of plain text notes. More so if your text editor will launch the URL for you. In TextMate, simply move the cursor over the URL and hit ⌅. Another small step in harnessing the power of plain text.

Syntax coloring is a feature of some text editors that displays different parts of the text in different colors depending upon the logical category of the text. This makes it easier to write structured texts whether these be code or markup. The Live Parsing Editor written to digitize the Oxford English Dictionary was probably the first text editor to use syntax coloring. (More information about LEXX or LPEX can be found in this article by M.F. Cowlishaw.) Syntax coloring makes the logical structure of your document visually apparent and hence the document easier to read. Syntax coloring is a feature of many text editors, but TextMate has the distinct advantage of making it really easy to modify and create new coloring “themes”. A number of user generated themes are available on this page of the TextMate Wiki.

TextMate Themes is a new theme depository that makes it easier to navigate user submitted themes. The theme depository also has some advanced features such as comments and user’s ratings. If you are in the market for a new theme, TextMate Themes may make your search easier. And if you are a theme author you should upload your theme.

If you have ever studied automata theory, perhaps you remember that nested brackets are the classic example of something that can’t be matched by a regular expression. So you might be surprised (or disbelieving) to see a regular expression that does exactly that. The explanation, of course, is that theory and practice are closer in theory than in practice: Onigurama regular expressions, in common with many other flavours, are more powerful than the things that computer scientists call “regular expressions”.

The key in this case is the recursion (or “subexpression call”) feature. (For those of you who know about such things, this feature makes it possible to represent any context-free language — a step up the Chomsky hierarchy.) I like to think that I invented this feature; certainly I wrote the initial implementation for the PCRE engine, which as far as I know is the first place that it appeared. However, the Onigurama implementation may be a case of independent rediscovery: the manual describes it as “Tanaka Akira special”.

Read the full explanation in the archives of the TextMate Mailing List. Thanks Robin!

Other articles of note are Martin Scharrer, developer of svn-multi, on the use of that package, “Version Control of LaTeX Documents with svn-multi” and my article “LaTeX and Subversion”.

Finally, yet more logic and LaTeX, Arthur Buchsbaum and Francisco Reinaldo have an article “A Tool for Logicians” describing the use of the turnstile package.

It’s a huge issue, with lots more of interest, so head over to PracTeX and check it out.

There are a variety of ways to implement code folding. Sometimes special delimiters are used to mark where in the text the fold is to occur; other times the folding is syntax-based. If the implementation of code folding is syntax-based, then this feature will only be useful for writing if you are using some form of structural markup such as LaTeX or DocBook.

Developed in the 70s in the Lisp community, code folding editors are the ancestor of outliners, such as OmniOutliner and TAO. (For some of the hitory of outliners see Outliners.com, Dave Winer’s history of More and Ted Goranson’s column About This Particular Outliner.) The expanding and collapsing file system viewer that first appeared in MacIntosh System 7 was an abstraction of the code folding UI, an abstraction that informs the UI of a variety of programs today.

As I posted earlier, BBEdit 8.7 features improved code folding. Following on the heals of this, TextMate revision 1413 offers a small refinement to its folding GUI:

[CHANGED] The right-pointing folding arrow is another color to make it visually distinct from the up/down arrows. Thanks to Paul Howson.

The visual distinction is a nice detail. Not everyone, however, was thrilled with the implementation:

It’s not just that the orange is garish (it is), but it is sufficiently loud to drown out the gray down arrow. Thomas Aylott of subtleGradient, benevolent soul that he is, has answered the howls of protest on the mailing list with a customized nib and png files that provided a more muted contrasting gray for the right arrow. The results can be viewed here and the files can be downloaded here. Thanks, Thomas, for teh awesomeness!

See Allan Odgaard’s email here. Sounds like it might be awhile before this is implemented, if it is, so there’s plenty of time to learn Git.