If you’re one lucky guy/girl that owns a copy of the excellent TextMate text editor, listen on and prepare the “Hooray!”.
I’m a recently converted TextMate user and as you may wonder, to edit txt2tags files is part of my everyday routine. Websites, articles and books, everything is t2t-marked.
For a few days I’ve used TextMate on the “black & white mode” and that was real unsexy. A decade of Vim hardcore use told me that syntax highlight is a Good Thing.
I’m the Great Cornholio! I need some T.P. for my Bundle!
For my total surprise, the making of the TextMate Txt2tags Bundle was a breeze. It’s damn easy to add the syntax rules and as the regexes format are similar to Python’s, it was a copy & paste dream.
Since I was there, I just couldn’t stop.
Besides the colors for the txt2tags markup, we also have:
- Tab Triggers for all the marksJust type the mark’s character and hit Tab. For example, to start a bold sentence, hit “
*
” followed by a Tab. It will expand to “****
“, with the cursor right at the middle, waiting for your words to be inserted. Very handy! - Keyboard ShortcutsStill on the bold example, you can select your words and press
Command-B
. They’ll be surrounded by the “**” marks. Quick comment/uncomment a block of lines withCommand-/
and move quotation in and out withCommand-]
andCommand-[
.To type a link, it’s even cooler. First, copy the desired URL to the clipboard (
Command-C
, you know). Then typeControl-Shift-L
and the link mark will appear, with the URL already filled. Type the link name and press Tab to leave the mark. Killer!You can also select some already-typed text, press
Control-Shift-L
and see it being linked without any typing. The same works for titles, images and even tables (just Tab-delimit your data and pressControl-Shift-|
).Press
Command-Esc
at any time to get the key listing:
Tip: Use keyboard shortcuts for selected text, use tab triggers for to-be-typed text.
- Tab Triggers for all settings and macrosNever read the Txt2tags User Guide anymore. Just type the setting name followed by a Tab to have all it’s arguments shown. And what about those funky “%Y %m” for the %%date macro? No problem, type “date” and hit Tab.
- Drag’n’drop supportImages, other txt2tags files and HTML files. Just drag them to the editor and watch the magic happening!
- Ready-to-use template for UNIX man pagesLoad the template, fill your program’s data and there it is: you have a full featured man page. To start, choose
File > New From Template > Txt2tags > Manual Page (man)
. - Painless conversion processThere are several shortcuts to automate the conversion process and see the results.
- Under the “Convert to…” menu you can convert your document to any txt2tags-supported format with a single click.
- Press
Control-Option-Command-P
(Wow, that hurts to type, but it’s easy to press) to get an instant clear text-only version of your document, just in case the markup is stealing your attention. - My favorite: press
Control-Command-P
to convert the file to HTML and open it in Safari (or your other default browser). It avoids the boring save-convert-switch-reload every time you’re editing your site pages.
Check out the full bundle menu expanded to finally shout your Hooray!:
That’s it! Download and double click to install.
Congratulations! This is great!
And the Windows users can also use this bundle with “e” editor (http://www.e-texteditor.com/). It use the same bundles of TextMate.
[ ]’s
It’s a shame that there’s no such thing for linux.
TextMate looks really good, but I promised myself I’d stick with FOSS only, so where’s this bundle for vim? :)
great job, and thanks :) The link to the zip file is down though, can you pls let me know when you have the link up.
As it often happens, it was something else that i was looking for that brought me to this web-page. Since you seem to be a seasoned t2t user, you can perhaps answer my query. I’m preparing a small report which contains blocks of shell commands. Naturally, i want these blocks to appear in monospace font. I can do
“$ command_1 in block_1“
“$ command_2 in block_1“
etc. Note that the `$’ is the shell-prompt.
Is there is better way to format the code-block without having to use those double tick-marks in each line?
Hoping that you can help me with this… Thanks :)
Hello Ritesh,
I’ve fixed the ZIP file link, thanks!
The code-block you want is already implemented in txt2tags, just open/close it with three consecutive tick-marks:
```
$ command 1
$ command 2
$ command 3
$ command 4
```
Bye
Thanks a lot Aurelio, this looks really neat :) It’s my first foray into TexMate, so i’ll take some time to appreciate the app. However, i can already see how much more pleasing it is going to be editing .t2t code, compared to what i’ve been using on vim/linux …
Link to zip file is broken. Look here:
https://github.com/textmate/txt2tags.tmbundle
Thanks Jan! I’ve updated the links in the post to the GitHub page.