TextMate  Power Editing for the Mac James Edward Gray II

I’ve read a couple of the beta versions of this book from the Pragmatic Press. It’s good. If you are using TextMate, you should have this book. The current documentation for TextMate is pretty lame. This book does an admirable job of filling that void.

The writing style is easy to read, and is quite information dense. Content goes from basic cursor movement all the way to custom language support. It’s a good read, and packed with valuable and useful information.

That said, while I’m impressed with the book, I’ve become less and less impressed with TextMate itself. It’s a wonderful text editor and a sweet Mac app, and will long have a place on my dock. But for serious programming, it doesn’t cut it. I’ve gone back to “old faithful”… my constant companion from from way back.. GNU Emacs. If you’re doing serious programming, there’s nothing like Emacs.

I’ve whipped up a simple TextMate bundle for making rSpec a bit nicer to work with. You can download it here.

You might need to unzip the file (Safari does automatically), and put it in ~/Library/ApplicationSupport/TextMate/Bundles. Note you might have to create the Bundles folder.

At the moment it tweaks the ruby rules for coloring to colour context, specify, setup, and teardown as keywords. It also adds snippets for the same four: context<tab>, specify<tab>, setup<tab>, and teardown<tab>.

As part of my getting back on the rails train, I’ve decided to give TextMate another try as well. So far, so good. Im making a concerted effort to learn the ins & outs of it. I had been using RadRails, but it’s big, and rather slow at times. Also, it’s very obviously *NOT* a Cocoa application. It felt gratingly out of place.

TextMate truly is a nice editor.. it’s no big surprise it won an Apple design award at WWDC earlier this month.

Given my Emacs based “upbringing”, TextMate feels nice. I’m looking forward to getting to know this app well.

UPDATE: While TextMate is a sweet text editor, I’ve since decided that it is not the programming editor for me.. I’ve switched to GNU Emacs on OS X for that.