Ciarán Walsh’s Blog

I’ve not posted for far too long as I’ve been busy with the holidays, starting a new job and working on a project, so apologies for the downtime, but hopefully this marks the return of regular posting. I’ll also try to work through all the comments as I’m a bit behind, so if I’ve not replied to you then apologies again.

Today I’m going to give some information about using Macros. Macros are simply a set of actions which you can record and then play back whenever you like. Most actions, including text editing, find and replace, clipboard usage, commands and snippets will be recorded, but there are some which are not (switching files and moving to a symbol for example).

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Ciarán :: Feb.02.2008 :: TextMate, Tips :: 2 Comments »

If you’re like me then you no longer use multiple windows in Terminal.app at all, relying on tabs in a single window instead. Unfortunately this makes the hotkeys for switching between windows somewhat useless, so I did this SIMBL plug-in a while ago to change ⌘1-9 to switch between the tabs in the current window instead. I completely forgot to post it, but you can now download it here. See this post for how to install.

Ciarán :: Dec.10.2007 :: OS X, Projects :: 44 Comments »

I recently did some extensive reverse-engineering of Quick Look to investigate the API, mainly to track down how to get the cool zooming effect when Quick-Looking a file in Finder. It turns out it’s pretty simple to use Quick Look from your own code.

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Ciarán :: Dec.07.2007 :: Cocoa :: 13 Comments »

This just fixes a memory leak that could occur when using projects which weren’t under Subversion control. I’d recommend that everyone update to the new version.

Ciarán :: Dec.07.2007 :: Projects, TextMate :: 17 Comments »

Today I’ll talk about getting around in your projects. First up: moving between tabs in the project window.

To switch to the tab to either side of the current one you can use ⌥⌘← and ⌥⌘→, and to move directly to a tab simply press ⌘ and a number from 1-9. You can use the mouse to reposition tabs to move related files next to each other, to make switching easier.

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Ciarán :: Dec.06.2007 :: TextMate, Tips :: 5 Comments »

This update re-checks the SVN status of files when TextMate regains focus (to keep in-sync with commits etc. made on the command-line), and also replaces the ugly coloured triangles:

I’ve been on the lookout for some nice icons for a while, but I recently found out that the Windows TortoiseSVN project has generously put their icons under a separate license.

The download includes all the icons from the TortoiseSVN repository and one contributed by JiHO – he’s also included the SVG source file which you can modify with Inkscape.

If you wish to create your own icon set, take a look at the existing sets (found at ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/PlugIns/SVNMate.tmplugin/Contents/Resources/icons once the plug-in is installed). Any common image format should be loaded if the files have the proper name and extension.

Download SVNMate

Ciarán :: Nov.29.2007 :: Projects, TextMate :: 40 Comments »

Apparently this question is quite common – since TextMate does not show the full path of the currently edited file, people are not entirely clear on the file’s location. So I was asked to do this tip, which will cover 4 different methods of discovering the path to your current file, and hopefully teach some new tricks too.

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Ciarán :: Nov.27.2007 :: TextMate, Tips :: 8 Comments »

When I was working on the new Dialog system for TextMate I was having to restart TM a lot (to reload the plug-in after compiling) and it was becoming a pain to re-expand the project structure every time (side note: ⌃⌘R is handy for this since you’ll likely have a relevant file open already) so I wrote this plug-in to store the project tree state in the project file (and restore it when the project is opened).

Just download the plug-in and install it and projects will automatically start using it.

Ciarán :: Nov.26.2007 :: Projects, TextMate :: 3 Comments »

Allan was kind enough to share the code he’ll be using to draw the Finder labels for the file list in TextMate 2, so I’ve been able to update the TMLabels plug-in to closer match the appearance of labels in the Finder.

Get it here.

Ciarán :: Nov.25.2007 :: Projects, TextMate :: 6 Comments »

Someone wanted a mod for Leopard’s Terminal.app which would make the image showing through behind terminal windows blurred – here it is. See this post for installation instructions.

You can make terminal windows transparent by adjusting the opacity of the window background colour in Preferences – somewhere around 80% should work well. You can adjust the blurring level with the command:

defaults write com.apple.Terminal 'Blurminal Radius' -float 1.0

1.0 is the default – higher means more blur (you’ll need to restart Terminal.app for the changes to take effect).

I’m actually finding it very nice – it lets me use transparency without it getting in the way, but it’s there when you need it (say, to copy something from a browser window underneath).

Thanks to Alex Ross for the request, and the great name.

Ciarán :: Nov.16.2007 :: OS X, Projects :: 73 Comments »