A weblog about TextMate, the Universe, and Everything
In the previous article from this series we learned some basic things about Ruby and how to use it to make TextMate do our bidding. In this post, we’ll see how to use some of TextMate’s Ruby libraries to do more stuff.
Wanted to hack TextMate by creating new commands, but didn’t know how because you don’t know any scripting languages or how to do magic using the shell? Fear not, this post will show you all (or at least a small fraction of all) you need to know to use Ruby to write new and wonderful commands. No prior knowledge of Ruby is assumed.
This entry has a dual purpose. First, it demonstrates the typical workflow of the GTDAlt bundle through a (hopefully) easy to follow example. Second, it gives an example, with explanations, of how to create new languages/snippets/commands etc.
One of the lesser known features of the [GTDAlt] bundle is its handling of links. Suppose that you are in a line in your notes where something like this appears:
Then pressing ctrl-L opens this page (in your default browser). What might be not well known is that the same happens with mail links, e.g.:
will open your mail client and prepare an email to who@there.com. I might consider adding the rest of the note as default title for the email. More importantly, you can have links to files in your drive:
Then ctrl-L opens this file in the default application for it. You can create such a link by dragging a file with extension txt, gtd or markdown. You can add more admissible extensions by editing the file types allowed by the drag command in the bundle.
The GTDALT bundle now contains a script that processes an “Inbox file” for actions, and distributes them to appropriate places. The purpose of this script is to be used in conjunction with a program like Quicksilver. You use Quicksilver to append such lines to the inbox as described here. Then when you are ready to review things, you run the script. The script has not been tested extensively, so be careful the first couple of times you use it. It keeps backups, so theoretically you would not lose data.
The following is from the help file INBOX.txt from within the bundle.
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Feb | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |