Gary Haran.com

As all my programmers friends, co-workers and acquaintances moving towards Macs I get asked often about Textmate because I love it so much. Instead of giving everyone the 5 minutes crash course every time I thought I’d simply post here the must know things about my favorite text editor.

How to open Textmate from the command line

mate .  # opens current folder as a project
mate filename.txt  # opens only a single file

Common key shortcuts I use

Escape # completes token, cycles through all possibilities

Apple-T # Go to file in project mode
Apple-option-leftArrow # move to left tab
Apple-option-rightArrow # move to right tab

Apple-shift-T  # Go to symbol in file
Apple-F2 # bookmark line (adds a star in the gutter)
F2 # cycle through bookmarks

Apple-shift-L # find in your project

Ctrl-shift+< # creates starting and closing html tags
Ctrl-shift+> # cycles through < %=  %>, < %  %> and < %-  -%>

Ctrl-shift+D # dupplicates everything from the start of the line or selection

Ctrl-w # selects word/token

Apple-[ or Apple-] # indents/unindents line or selection

Apple-& (or Apple-shift-7 on most keyboards) # HTML entities

Advanced features I love

With mutli-line selections

Option  # column mode editing
Apple-option-A # end of line append

Bundle I recommend

Duane Johnson’s Bundle
This bundle offers one feature I really enjoy, it’s like column mode but where you add markers where you want with Option-S and replace them with a type as you replace string after hitting Option-F. Probably the most useful bundles of them all.