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SubscribeThe TextMate URL Scheme
TextMate registers a custom URL scheme on your system which allows you to open files in TextMate by asking the system to open a txmt URL.
The format is: txmt://open?«arguments» where arguments can be:
url— the actual file to open (i.e. afile://…URL), if you leave out this argument, the frontmost document is implied.line— line number to go to (one based).column— column number to go to (one based).
If you have TextMate installed, you can try it out by having it open /etc/profile.
One reason for this URL scheme is that many TextMate commands generate HTML output with links that open files in TextMate. For example the TODO bundle has a “Show TODO List” command which will scan your entire project for FIXME and TODO tags, then present the found results nicely in HTML, and allow you to click on them to go to the appropriate location. Another example is the Xcode bundle, which has a “Build” command that will show errors and warnings that correctly link to your source code.
But seeing how these commands generally run in a custom HTML view inside TextMate, it is possible to use JavaScript extensions, so a much better case for the txmt URL scheme is debugging web applications!
For Rails there is Duane Johnson’s Footnotes plug-in (included in the default Rails bundle) and for PHP, Ciarán Walsh recently added a few commands to easily allow PHP scripts to markup stack traces with proper txmt links (see PHP → Help → 3.3 TextMate Support File).
An unfortunate reality of web development is that if you work on mainstream sites, you need to test your site in Internet Explorer. If you do this using Parallels Desktop for Mac then (thanks to Ruy) you can have txmt URLs work in IE.
