Bagel Belly Blog

Growing to love TextMate

Working on a Mac is definitely making me seek out the fluffier, friendlier side of computing. I've found myself using the gorgeous TextMate more and more over the last few weeks, when I'm not fighting with Java in Eclipse, that is.

There are two really neat features that are making me want to hug TextMate this week. Firstly, you can throw it an entire directory, and it will automatically start a new project with all the files and folders visible in the project drawer. Nothing too remarkable - I've seen it done in BB$$Edit££ before (hmm, where'd those superfluous characters come from?). What's really neat - and I don't know if BB££Edit$$ does this or not - is that TextMate knows enough to ignore SCM directories such as CVS and .svn. That's just so nice. It does exactly what you'd want it to do.

The second feature I'm loving isn't so terribly revolutionary either, but is just so far into cute and fluffy that I'm totally addicted. For years I've done all my SVN commit messages from the command line, for example:

svn commit -m "Fixed bug #123 by doing foo to bar"

David showed me how he was doing it - in TextMate. I've seen editors being used for commit messages before (and used nano or vi(m) myself), but somehow syntax highlighting and the TextMate GUI .... *swoon*

Anyway, I highly recommend adding the following to your .bash_profile (or whatever):

export SVN_EDITOR=/usr/local/bin/tm_wait