HOW TO: Make the Most of TextMate

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For web developers, a key part of the toolkit is a solid text editor. Vi and Emacs wars aside, there are lots of good choices for web developers, ranging from the ultra-sparse to the full-on IDE.

One of the most popular text editors for Mac OS X among coders is TextMate. Despite not receiving many major updates since 2007, TextMate is still a favorite amongst developers, front-end coders and even writers (a few of Mashable‘s bloggers use TextMate to compose first drafts of blog posts).

On its own, TextMate is a good program. With the right add-ons and modifications, however, TextMate can be a dream come true. Even if we never see a TextMate 2, here are some tips to making the most out of your TextMate installation.


Install Some Themes


Out of the box, TextMate comes with a handful of themes, but there are many more options for your text editing enjoyment.

In a previous post, I compiled some of my favorite TextMate themes from over the years and put them together in a handy package on GitHub.

To install a theme, just double click it. TextMate, like other text editors, is designed for monospaced fonts. Mac OS X comes with several choices, including Menlo, which made its appearance in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

If you want to further explore your programming font choices, check out this article, written by my friend Dan Benjamin, which provides a great overview of some of the most popular choices.


Add Some Plugins


Despite not receiving any major updates for well, years, TextMate remains a favorite among old and new developers. If I had to pick a single reason, it would be the extensible nature of the program.

Simply put, TextMate can be extended and improved via the use of plugins and bundles. Plugins can impact the program as a whole, whereas bundles are specific collections of commands, snippets and shortcuts.

Some of my favorite TextMate plugins include:

  • WebMate — This lets you preview and edit HTML content in TextMate.
  • MissingDrawer — This adds a better project window interface to TextMate.
  • SVNMate — A nice SVN integration for TextMate.

What’s even better than just downloading the plugins is downloading the plugins and a set of UI modifications. One of my favorite TextMate “packages” is Green Moleskine, which has recently been updated to version 1.2. The new version includes Snow Leopard support for some of the UI modifications.

Green Moleskine also includes SVNMate, WebMate and MissingDrawer, but the link to MissingDrawer on GitHub has an updated version of that plugin.

For new TextMate installations, I usually just start with Green Moleskine and then build out.


Get GetBundles


Without a doubt, bundles are my favorite part of TextMate. I never thought I would be the type of person who got religious about my text editor, but the bundles feature in TextMate has made me a disciple.

Over the years, TextMate bundles have been created for practically every web framework and task you can imagine. You can find these bundles online and double click the *.tmbundle file to install.

But what if there was a better way to discover and install bundles, within TextMate itself? There is, and it is called GetBundles. GetBundles has a graphical interface that allows you to search the official TextMate bundle repository, the review queue and GitHub. The GitHub support is really slick, because these days, that’s where most of the updates and new code ends up being released.

The easiest way to install GetBundles is to pop open Terminal in Mac OS X and paste in the lines that Trey Piepmier thoughtfully set up on his blog.

Once GetBundles is installed, you can search the various repositories and click on a bundle to install it — and also check for updates to the bundles you already use.


Bundle Bonanza


Once GetBundles is installed, the final step to an awesome TextMate experience is track down some bundles.

These are a few of my favorites:

  • Blogsmith Bundle — Back when I wrote for TUAW and DownloadSquad, my colleague Brett Terpstra created a bundle to help us with our blogging. He did this because the backend of the publishing tool we used was unable to connect to XML-RPC clients like MarsEdit. This bundle, which included things like the ability to select a group of words and quickly insert a link, search archives or add tags and other information to a post, became something that I was so reliant on, I commissioned Brett to write me a Mashable-specific add-on bundle when I started working here. If you do any type of web writing, this Bundle, which works with MultiMarkdown, is an absolute gem.
  • MultiMarkdown Bundle for TextMate — John Gruber’s Markdown syntax is a format for writers who want markup that is readable and fast. MultiMarkdown adds even more features in the form of a TextMate bundle.
  • CSS3 Bundle — David DeSandro (of jQuery Masonry fame) created this excellent CSS3 bundle for TextMate, complete with browser-specific prefixes.
  • HTML5 Boilerplate Bundle — Darren Wood made this bundle, which puts all the HTML5 Boilerplate goodies at your fingertips.

How have you tricked out your TextMate install? Let us know in the comments.


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