TextMate Trimming & Shortcuts

March 17, 2009   ·   By Sheldon Conaty

TextMate is my development environment of choice these days. It supports the concept of bundles as an extension mechanism. Several great bundles are shipped with TextMate and I find they cover most of my needs.

Additional ones can be installed and there are several ones which aid Rails development. For a while I ran RubyAMP but I found TextMate’s memory usage went through the roof. So currently I just run the vanilla set.

Hiding Unwanted Bundles

I stripped down the bundles which are available in TextMate. It ships with a wide range of bundles which just get in the way when you just want to work with HTML, CSS and Ruby/Rails.

If you want to do the same go to the bundle editor, via the ‘Show Bundles’ option in the ‘Bundles’ menu and press the ‘filter’ button. For full details refer to the bundles manual.

Useful Keyboard Shortcuts

Key Modifer Legend :⌘ = Command, ⌥ = Option, ^ = Ctrl, ⇧ = Shift, ⎋ = Esc, ␣ = Space, ↩ = Return/Enter, ⇥ = Tab

Global Shortcuts (work on most types of files)

• ^h = Brings up help on the current word. For example W3C reference help for HTML or Rails Doc for rb files.
• ⌥ ⎋ = Auto complete. Suggests possible attributes, etc. For example type <img ⌥ ⎋ and a popup with possible attributes appears.
• ⇥ = Expand snippet. For example in an ruby file, type : and then press tab. This expands to :label => value.

HTML Specific Shortcuts

• ⌘& = Pop-up entity/escaping commands menu.
• ⌥⌘. = Insert close tag.
• ⌃< = Make closing/opening tags for word to left of cursor.
• ^␣ = Non breaking space.