Unfortunately for us mere mortals, it may still be half a year’s wait for the public beta, but I don’t think that matters as much. As soon as TextMate is released to more people than Allan and Ciaran, and even if the only thing they can confirm is that they got a copy of TM2, I think that is proof enough for the waiting masses that TM2 is coming along, that it’s not vaporware, and the Macromates is a company you shouldn’t write off just yet.

Allan will probably have people signing a NDA to avoid competition copying and publishing features before TM2 is out, but the most important thing is that TM2 is in a state where it can be used for text editing and is still under heavy development.

Hopefully this will also stop the negative comments around TM2 being vaporware, when it’s clearly not.

You can read my previous speculation of what to come in TextMate 2 here and here.

Transcript from IRC:

allan: joachimm: Avian is coming along nicely though
alexross: allan: nicely?
allan: as in, I think I could give previews to really trusted people in a month maybe
alexross: oh, that does sound nice
ciaran:
allan: yeah, still lacks lots of stuff, but at least it will be as good at editing text as 1.x
…
allan: there can easily be 6 months from preview to trusted people to actual beta

Update: TextMate 2 should be in private alpha in a month’s time, and public beta in maybe six months. Read more here.

To all who have previously been testing Dialog 2, it’s now important that you delete your Dialog plugins to make sure you utilise the latest version that shipped with TM, or you’ll end up with completions only working partially or not at all. You’ll find the plugins in

~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/PlugIns.

I also recommend you delete your Support folder if you’ve checked out this too, as TM already shipped with a very recent version of this. The support folder is located at

/Library/Appplication Support/TextMate/Support 

if you have checked it out.

Dialog 2 also includes pretty tool-tips as I’ve mentioned before. Not all bundles are utilising them yet, but as always Ciaran is giving the PHP bundle great love, so you can use that to see how it looks. Just leave the caret near a built-in function and press ⌥F1 and enjoy the new coloured tool tips.

I also recommend reading the release notes to see what other goodies are out there. Amongst other things is some great work by Alex Ross and Luke Daley which will now pop up a dialog if the script/command requests input. (This was often the cause of confusion when using the svn bundle without using ssh keys)

If you missed the release notes when you updated TextMate, you’ll find them in the Help menu → Release Notes.

1. Create a new command
2. Save → Current file
3. Key equivalent → ⌃⇧O
4. Input → None
5. Output → Discard

if [[ -d $TM_SELECTED_FILE ]]; then
TM_PATH="$TM_SELECTED_FILE"
elif [[ -f $TM_SELECTED_FILE ]]; then
TM_PATH="`dirname "$TM_SELECTED_FILE"`"
else
TM_PATH="`dirname "$TM_FILEPATH"`"
fi

open "$TM_PATH"

Now if you press ⌃⇧O you’ll be prompted to open in Terminal or open in Finder.

Make sure you check out my other TextMate tips, and don’t forget to visit Malesca and check out his TextMate tips too.

Update: TextMate 2 should be in private alpha in a month’s time, and public beta in maybe six months. Read more here.

I’ve earlier covered what we can expect to come in TextMate 2, and this time I’m listing what’s come from Allan himself.
All quotes are of the author of TextMate, Allan Odgaard.

Search & replace, regex:

• Named captures will be availble as $variable.

  The named captures will be available as $variables. Source.

• Better syntax for using captures in replacement string. Is 123$456 $4, or $45, or $456? With the new syntax, there’ll be no doubt: 123${4}56.

  There will however be a significant update to this syntax in… the future This will allow using ${1} etc. like in snippets. Source.

• Introduction of “Find all”, which will also allow you to do further operations on found items.

  Also, I have another feature coming in 2.0 which will allow you to effectively do the further replacements on the results of a ‘find all’ (so even w/o SmartyPants.pl, there will be a simple way to do the same). Source.

Drawer:

Note: I think the drawer will be replaced by a panel in 2.x, but I have no sources for this at the moment.

• Menu shortcuts in context menu in drawer will work (better).

  The only solution is to have the items in the top menu and let the Carbon Menu Manager do all the magic keyboard handling that Cocoa applications can’t do — I will do this in the 2.0 relayout of things. Source.

• It will likely be possible to sort files in the drawer.

  Not possible. There will (most likely) be some sorting options in the future. Source.

• No more virtual TextMate projects. A folder will be the project.

  Because the file system is there to group files into folders. Having TextMate do the exact same thing is IMO conceptually wrong. It also complicates things like for example having commands run on a project and generally just makes your project “groupings” non-portable. Source. I would strongly recommend against getting too dependent on the virtual grouping that tmproj files allow, as I presently have no intention of keeping that in 2.0. Source.

Bundles and bundle development

The bundle editor as we know it will very likely be gone in 2.x. I’ll see if I can dig up a source for this later. I’m not sure what will replace it either, but seing how important bundles are to TextMate, I’m sure we can expect some kind of improvement. My guess would be that you work with the bundle as any other folder and take it from there instead of the bundle editor

• Dependency checking for bundles.

  That said, I am looking into a more formalized dependency system so e.g. the entire Git bundle (sans Help) can be marked to require git, or we can have a bundle require Leopard etc. Source.

• Command line interface to the TextMate parser.

  I will provide a CLI interface to the TextMate parser in the future, that way we can fully automate such testing. And yes, it really should be sort of a requisite then, to include tests with the grammars Source.

• CocoaDialog will likely be gone.

  We are deprecating the use of CocoaDialog (and I am not 100% sure TM 2 will ship with it), so it would be good to have a TextMate::UI wrapper for these, so we can switch the implementation to use DIALOG when we add file requester support here. Source.

• Self-aware projects.

  Yes, there are thoughts toward that Source.

Working with text

• Better indentation.

  I have these notes from Jacob: http://pastie.textmate.org/189818 Source.

• Improvements to overwrite mode

  There are a few things in the overwrite mode that doesn’t as they should. I hope to address all of that in 2.x. Source.

• Possibility to highlight discontinious text.

  I do however feel TM needs a way to highlight discontinuous text segments, and technically this can be made using dynamic scopes, which in practice can be used by a command to “parse out” the selection… Source.

• Ability to disable soft-wrap for specific parts of a document.

  No, but it’s certainly something I would like to have myself as well. Source.

• Select Current Scope will be improved.

  Some cases I am aware of and will address in the future, some cases probably cannot be solved at all, and some cases might automatically be solved with new grammar features. Source.

• Highlight of paragraph. not just current line.

  Not currently possible. It is not entirely unlikely that it might be possible in a future release. Source.

Other

• Find in project will work in a separate thread, to avoid hanging TextMate.

  In a future update, yes… Source.

• Logging of tool tips and hence the possibility to show them again by command if necessary.

  I think a log is an excellent idea. So basically all (command) tool tip output goes to ~/Library/Logs/ with a date stamp or similar, preferably with some newline escaping so a “repeat last tool tip” command would just tail -n1 «log», and similarly for a copy. Source.

• Submenu titles in inline menu (When you press a key equivalent that matches several items). Example: Source.

  I’ve added a TODO to the relevant source Source.

• TextMate will remember your session, open files, modified files etc. between sessions.

  Complete session restore, including state of modified files, is OTOH pretty high on the list. Source.

• TextMate clipboard will have better heuristics for intermixing third party copy into the clipboard.

  The heuristic used will be better in next major update, that might solve this compatibility issue. Source.

• TextMate 2.0 is in a state where it can be used.

  What I can say is that a) TM 2 is in a state where I use it myself Source.

Unlikely to be included

• Selecting different parts of text in a document at the same time and use it for copy and paste. Note: The unlikeliness refers to the copy and paste part

I have no real plans of this. I think my last comments on the topic was something like this not being very useful because of how it would not be easy accessible via keyboard only and it would introduce a lot of complexity in basically every single thing that potentially works with the selection, in many cases having to define how a transformation should work in the case of discontinuous selections (which isn’t always intuitive) — so hardly worth it. Source.

Final words

Of course this is not a complete list, it’s actually just what I cared to read through in a bored moment. For instance I know split-windows are requested a lot, too much for Allan to completely ignore it, but I have no idea when they will/if it will be included. I also think/know he has some other great ideas he just can’t talk about to avoid the competition snatching them. Most of the competition is probably subscribed to the mailing list.

I’d just like to add this final quote from Allan, which I think is very important that everyone respect and understand.

I have taken note of the request, it might be added to a future version, I can’t really say for sure before I have actually implemented it and shipped the version where it has been added.

I put emphasis here on shipped as well because sometimes a feature is pulled again for various reasons (could be that it turns out not to work so well, might be because it complicates the implementation of other features, etc.). This is one of the reasons that I am not commenting on specifics wrt 2.0. Source.

What would you like to be included?

This command has been updated, you can read what was changed here.

You can now download the command here: Go To First Non-Whitespace Character

It’s actually very easy to sort out, and even though I’ve thought about fixing this before, I never managed to wrap my head around it. The whole solution is to record a macro, and it takes you about 40 seconds. The whole procedure is as follows in TextMate:

• Press ⌥⌘M to start recording a macro
• Press ⌘← to go to the beginning of the line
• Press ⌘F and search for [^\s]|\n with regular expressions enabled (Thanks to Abhi Beckert)
• Press ← to go to beginning of selection(unselecting)
• Press ⌥⌘M to stop recording the macro.
• Press ⌃⌘M to save your macro
• Give the macro a name and a key equivalent (I used ⌘← to overwrite the normal go to beginning of line behaviour)

Done!

ph^: allan: Now that Duke Nukem forever has released a new gameplay-video … :p

Anyway. Being a regular on the irc channel and mailing list for some time now, I’ve gained quite much information on what’s in development and even bits and pieces of what TM2 will offer.

Update: TextMate 2 should be in private alpha in a month’s time, and public beta in maybe six months. Read more here.

Update: More TM2 speculation here

DISCLAIMER: None of this is officially released, supported or confirmed by Allan/macromates.com. Some or all of this may never be part of the TextMate distribution at all. It will however be cool if it is!

Dialog2:

Dialog2 is the successor of Dialog, which intent was to allow bundles to use dialogs to request strings, show choices etc. With Dialog2, Ciaran Walsh is bringing the Dialog to the next level by amongst other code changes is introducing a set of new window helpers. It’s also written in a way that makes it a lot easier to extend and add more features later. There already is a ruby wrapper in place(Support/lib/ui.rb) which makes it very easy to take advantage of the new Dialog.

Prettier tool-tips

By using HTMLTips helper from Dialog2 you get easy access to creating custom tool tips in HTML and CSS. The result, here showed with “Documentation for Word” from the PHP Bundle:

Code completion

The new Dialog can also be used for code completion. Some footage shows how Dialog2 suggests functions as you type, and inserts the function as a snippet where you can tab to the next parameter. With the new aforementioned ruby wrapper for the new Dialog it should be a walk in the park for the bundle developers to add this. (I managed!)

Intelligent code completion / Intellisense

One of the biggest griefs in the community with TextMate has been the lack of intelligent code completion, often referred to as intellisense. Currently you can use ⎋ (esc) to toggle thru your previously written words and a predefined set of words defined by the bundle author, but it offers no way to see what parameters the functions and methods expects. There have been attempts by some bundle authors, but now there’s work in progress for making that easier too. Currently it requires the bundle author to write a lexer. Some example footage can be seen here(PHP), 2, 3 and here(Ruby).

Better handling of command line input (or lack thereof)

Another big problem in TM has been with shell commands that might need input. The first example that comes to mind is the subversion bundle. There is no way for the bundle to know whether you’re setup with ssh keys, ssh agent, or have to type your password every time you commit. Hence if subversion is asking for a password on STDIN while the command is executing, it will fail or even stall TextMate. Luke “alkemist” Daley set out to sort this, and with some help from allan he came up with tm_interactive_input. This basically injects into the read function in OS X and with some black magic kung fu figures out if the read process belongs to TM. If so, it will open up a dialog requesting the input.

Pretty bundles

Thomas “subtleGradient” Aylott is working on what he refers to as:

a rough framework for making gui applications built inside textmate command windows

and it looks like this:

It allows a bundle developer to create a GUI using HTML/CSS & Javascript. And the buttons in the GUI can run shell scripts and pass data to them interactively. With the possibly coming terminal stuff in TM2 it should also gain the ability to run any TextMate bundle commands, macros & snippets. .

TextMate 2

There isn’t a whole lot to say about TM2 yet, other than it’s coming. Allan has said several times that he does most of the TM2 development in TM2, so it’s there and it’s mostly working, it’s just not for the rest of us to see and use yet.

One feature that might make it into TM2 is the ability for bundles to get a copy of the current text buffer, which will allow a bundle to do some heavy scanning in the buffer, without affecting the responsiveness of TM. This is great news for auto-completion and other commands which needs to scan the whole document.

Another often requested feature is for bundles to have better access to TextMate’s scoping system. This could replace the need for a lexer for things like intellisense, and thus lower the bar for implementing such. If this makes it into TM2 only Allan knows, but I really do hope so.

I don’t really know what people expect from TM2, but your expectations should most likely be pointed towards bundles, not TextMate itself. TM2 is afaik a complete rewrite of TM, with a lot of new “invisble” features for the bundles to take advantage of, not the users directly. TextMate’s strength has never been the editor on its own, but the extensibility it supports, and thus bundles.

Other interesting things

• Yehuda Katz, with help from others on github.com has released a ruby gem that allows you to install, uninstall and list TextMate bundles like normal ruby gems. This makes it very easy for those out there who aren’t friends with subversion. You can read more about it here.
• There has been a lot discussion on how to best maintain bundles in a central repository. There has been many requests for a issue tracking system for the bundles, and I recall that both Jira and Lighthouse have been in the spotlight, but I think eventually Redmine pulled the longest straw due to its free and open nature, and that Allan can host it on macromates.com. But either way, nothing is written in stone, and there has been no final decision.
• There has also been talk about moving from subversion to git, but I’m not quite sure this is going to happen. Due to the nature of bundles, where each bundle has one or more main maintainers, but also super maintainers who maintain all over, Allan has mentioned that subversion is doing this pretty good already, while git might be difficult here. Nothing is written in stone here either, but it is on the agenda.