| Developer | MacroMates |
| License | Free |
| Download | Free Download |
TextMate is a GUI text Editor for Mac OS X which has general-purpose. Developed by Allan Odgaard, it was initially released on October 2004, about 15 years ago. TextMate is aimed to provide aids to text-editing supported by plenty of basic features as well as some extra features. All of them are very useful and helpful for editing sections. Thus, if you are working on editing text of a big project, TextMate is considerably recommended.
TextMate Features
On this page, we are going to inform the detail basic features as well as the additional features of TextMate in which you can use to optimize your working performance:
Hierarchal Scopes
Along with the hierarchal scopes, the users can create their own arbitrarily complex syntax coloring modes. It can be done by using the version of the Apple ASCII property list format which has been modified. This is aimed to define language grammars which allow nesting rules using Oniguruma Regular Expression library. Then those grammars assign specific “scopes”.
The scopes will tell us what we are looking for at an entitled link along with the link and the list of MediaWiki document.
Commands
TextMate provides a support in terms of user-defined and user-editable commands which are interpreted by bash or the interpreter, especially with a shebang. TextMate can send my types of input such as the current document, selected text, and the current word.
The command may also be able to receive selected text, transform it, and re-insert it into the document replacing the selection. Other commands might be able to create a new document for their output by showing a tooltip.
You can also find commands in the bundles of many languages such as bash, PHP or Ruby in order to run the current document or project.
Snippets
The snippets of the TextMate can be defined as pieces of text which can be inserted into the document at the current location through a context-sensitive keystroke as well as tab completion.
Snippets are considered “intelligent” to support “tabs stops” dynamic updating, accessing to variables, and to run the inline script. This causes complicated behavior. The position of snippets in the TextMate can be dynamically changed by the tabs stops.
Meanwhile, you can use the TextMate environment variables to support information about the current scope, line number, and author name.
Bundles
Bundles is a group of functions which includes language grammars, snippets, macros, commands, and templates. Any of these function can be used by pressing a keyboard shortcut and typing a specific word and finally pressing the “tab key” or the so-called “tab triggers”.
The tab triggers are very much useful to combine with snippets to provide great ease coding in languages.
TextMate Additional Features
TextMate has some useful additional features which are common to programming editor. Those are:
- Folding code sections: best used to hide some areas of a document which has not been edited.
- Search and replace: speeds up the complicated text manipulation.
- Pop-up: provides a list of functions in the recent document.
- Clipboard: enables you to cut and paste many sections of the text at once.
- Column editing: enables you to add the same text to several rows of text for tabular data manipulation.
- Rmate: supports to have the TextMate launched as editor for files.
Conclusion
All in all, TextMate is very good for text editing. The features, as well as its additional features, are all useful to contribute the good result of better editing. Thus, this software is very considerable to be taken into the list of the recommended software.