I mostly use Textmate to write Java and produce LaTeX documents and as a resutly most of my wishes revolve around this but this is my WISHLIST, things I’d love to have but ultimately wouldn’t be too disappointed if they never appeared. After all I still love Textmate as it is!
Fullscreen mode
The actual editing area centred on the screen and the rest of the screen blacked out ala Pages fullscreen mode.
Code completion
Sure snippets remove some of the need for code completion but it would still be nice to have suggestions sometimes, even an extension of the current autocomplete so that the suggestions it has are displayed to me in a tool tip would be nice.
Better handling of large files
I often use Textmate to open those random log files you find on servers and occasionally to open up a binary to see if I can glean any information from it. When I do this I find myself sat wondering if I should have gone for a fresh cup of tea or not.
Local revision history
Something I first saw in eTextEditor and was instantly jealous of and something I’d really like to see included in Textmate 2 but I know its very pie in the sky…
The way I see this working would be to keep a revision list of the document that is being edited on every save of that individual document. This would mean on each and every save a new revision is created and stored in some type of backend database. This would then keep track of all those little changes to the document and at the same time gives a way back if you decide you don’t want to keep it. Then as an extension of this it should be possible to explicitly create a revision with a commit message so that milestone can be keep. Naturally this would need some kind of funky user interface to be able to navigate though all this information that would constantly be building up. The use of the automatic creation of a revision on a save it would lack commit messages so an interface like Time Machine would provide a good way of visualising the revision information.
Its no secret that I’m a HUGE fan of Textmate for pretty every task that involves Java, latex or any of the more obscure languages that I’m required to try and understand as part of my degree course. At the start of university I had someone ask me why I used Textmate over BlueJ/Eclipse when I was writing code – my answer?
It’s simple and it gets the job done.
Of course even though I love the current version I still want a new shiny copy of Textmate2 and if Allan’s other blog is anything to go by it should be pretty damned awesome.
That there might just be wisdom in the crowd when they are using a location vector tag based system to rank documents.
Who knew?
When including images in a LaTeX document its best to have them as PDF’s – this way they keep any vectorness they have about them and will appear sharp no matter what size you have them. A PNG will be rasterised and look blurry.
I know there will be people out there who totally disagree with me on this but sometimes proper source control is overkill.
Recently I’ve been working on a lot of small projects and with the addition of another computer to my ever increasing collection and I’ve increasing found that working between the laptop at uni and the desktop at home has been hard.
Keeping a track of all the changes and additions I’ve made, when I’m using proper source control I’ve got to remember to check in code from either machine when I’ve made these changes. This often means that if I’ve forgotten to commit my changes and the version I’m working with isn’t the latest what is the point in working on it at all?
The main problem I have with the proper source control approach is that I have to do a full commit with a commit message, this is great when I’ve got a new feature working or when I’ve fixed that Heisenbug, it gives me a point in time where I can go back and have a proper working copy of my code – this is awesome because I know that everything committed will be of a certain quality. But having to commit every time I swap machines means that this all goes out of the window, it’ll get a quick “Latest version” message and sometimes if I know something is broken it’ll have “x is broken” but at most that is what’ll have.
So where is the middle ground here? I wanted something that wasn’t manual, copying and pasting a folder around, which could be easily forgotten when moving machines and offers no protection from me being an idiot and copying an old version over a newer version. Obviously I think the proper source control path is overkill and eventually dilutes the usefulness of it so I found a better way to keep my source on ALL my computers up to date and available anywhere.
That solution is Dropbox and for me its easily the best solution for keeping things synced across computers. I keep a symbolic link of my work folder and it sorts the rest for me. Really its that easy. Sign up, install, sign in, create symbolic link and you’ve got all your work across all your computers.
Version control obviously has its place and is a wonderful tool that I push on all my uni friends as a great tool to use, and I use it myself to make sure I have another offsite backup and a set of steps (and working versions) of my work. But from now on Dropbox will save me time and headaches.