I am considered by all my computer literate friends to be a good programmer, at least one has worked full time for a year programming so I’m probably not a “bad” programmer. It occurs to me that maybe I should speak a little more on Textmate. Textmate is a code editor and supports so many languages I’ve not even heard of some of them. I will now list what I think it’s best features are.
#1 Code Snippets
This wins hands down for me as the best part of Textmate. If I type in “for” and hit the tab button I get an entire for-loop structure and can then traverse around it using the tab key. Better yet, creating new snippets is very easy to do and ever so useful. Better yet, you can make it so that snippets fire on any key of choice and only within a predefined context. To put it in layman’s terms, it effectively multiplies your typing speed for commonly used things.
#2 Column Editing
Frequently when editing my code I will have everything neatly aligned to a certain tab stop and then group commands together, this creates columns of code. Then of course I find that I need to insert something into the same place on each line. Sometimes a find and replace will work but not always and it’s also slower. I can type and edit multiple columns at once. It’s not something I thought to be useful until I had it.
#3 Macros
Macros are a saved set of commands, I have for instance a macro to remove the time stamps from an MSN log. One of the most useful macros that comes with Textmate are the math ones. Tell me how fast it will take you to grab a calculator (handheld or computer program), enter in the following equation and then type out the answer?
(0.2 * (992/2.3))^ 3
For me it took seconds to type it out as I have a keyboard that I type with for several hours a day. I then select the equation and push a key combo. I can choose (with the push of a key) to replace the equation with the result, append the result, round the result and several more things. I have just found that there is a blogging bundle too. 3 minutes and it’s all setup.
#4 Syntax Colouring
Any good code editor has syntax colouring, Textmate goes the extra AU and gives you more selectors to colour and style. If that’s not enough, you can add your own.
#5 Projects
Textmate includes the ability to manage projects in the form of a “list” of files that includes folders. The real cool part however is that with a plugin (installing takes all of 1 second, just double click the file) called “TMLabels” that allows me to colour code my files so that I know how complete they are.
When I used Linux there was some notepad thing by default that used syntax colouring (that you could also customise). I can’t remember the name of the program, but I don’t think it was textmate. It’s quite handy
Hope your demo goes well/went well, depending on when you read this
Is it anything like ’stickies’?
No, the stickies I think you mean are a dashboard widget for keeping notes.