TextMate News

Anything vaguely related to TextMate and macOS.

2.0 Status and FAQ

The release of Mavericks has seen a new wave of users switching over to the alpha release so this is a good time to go over the common questions people are having:

Theming

Switching themes can be done from the View → Themes menu, to change the font size use View → Font → Show Fonts. Don’t see a theme you like? You can find a new selection of themes from the Bundles section in Preferences, click the Themes tab to limit your view.

Projects

In 1.x projects were specially created files that referenced a directory and collected settings. One of the biggest changes in 2.0 is that now everything you open is automatically a project. If you open a directory then that will be the project root and you will get a file browser on the side. Opening a single file sets the project root to that file’s directory even though the file browser isn’t shown, it can be enabled from the View menu however.

If you use a certain project frequently you can add it to your favorites from the gear menu at the bottom of the browser, you can then access them from File → Open Favorites… or ⇧⌘O.

If you need to change the settings for a particular project you can add a .tm_properties file to the directory. We detailed how to do this in a previous blog post

More features of projects including how to customize window titles can be found in the Projects section of the manual.

File Browser

Another big change is the sidebar, in 1.x it functioned mostly as a form of source list to select a file to edit. For 2.0 we have expanded it’s functionality to be a full file browser. This means you can move, duplicate, etc. files or select multiple files to perform other actions on, including bundle actions. One example is to select files before you use a version control action like show changes, commit, or revert. This feature works well with the file browser’s ability to show version control status.

One change this necessitated is requiring you to double-click files to open them like in the Finder or single-clicking on the icon to open immediately. We encourage you to give this a chance as it adds a lot of functionality to a project. However if you’d rather have the ability to single-click again you can run the following in a terminal:

defaults write com.macromates.TextMate fileBrowserSingleClickToOpen -bool true

Bundles

Installing new bundles and keeping them updated has never been easier, just look in Preferences under Bundles for a widely varied list. When the bundle is updated TextMate will automatically download the update for you, the arrow beside each will take you to the bundle’s repository. You can find out what features and bug fixes have been added under TextMate → About TextMate → Bundles. (Bundle updating can be disabled under Software Update.) Some bundles will already be installed and those with generic names such as Bundle Support, Themes, Source, SCM, and Text provide support for other bundles and should not be uninstalled.

If you have bundles to install that are not covered by the installer you can install them by double-clicking the bundle just like before. Should you have a bundle you personally created you will need to move it:

Bundles you created in 1.x will be at:

~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles

And need to be moved to:

~/Library/Application Support/Avian/Bundles

Note:

  • The ~ character in these paths refers to your home directory (/Users/«yourname»/).
  • The Library folder under Mavericks is hidden by default, you can access it from the Go menu in Finder while holding down option.
  • The directories under Application Support may not exist on your system, should they not you should create them.

Status

An area currently being worked on is the manual, currently a work in progress. Once this is in place we plan to shift into the beta stage.

When released the final version of 2.0 will be a free upgrade for all 1.x license holders with the exception of those that got their license through MacHeist. We have not setup a method to accept upgrade fees yet but that will be coming. For now the release does not enforce the license restrictions so MacHeist users can upgrade now.

More information on how to customize TextMate is available at the 2.0 FAQ including a list of hidden settings.

While we recommend everyone move over to 2.0, if you need to keep 1.x around a little longer on Mavericks we have a guide of how to set that up.

categories General TextMate 2