May

25

I use Textmate as my primary editor. Very very good. If you are on a Mac and haven’t tried, you need to download the trial version and give it a try. It features projects, code snippets, and automation. It is a pure Mac app. Very very nice. And yes, it has ActionScript support and color coding.

Enough gushing. One problem I have had is with a lag time that happens as the project drawer refreshes as the app regains focus. Only happens when using mounted drives. I work off of a Samba share that I have set up on my home Web server, and the lag was really annoying. Every time I would leave Textmate to go check out a change in Flash or a Web browser, Textmate loses the OS focus and when going back to Textmate it would refresh the project drawer, essentially indexing all the files in my project folder. With on large sites takes a good couple of seconds.

So I found a work around today. I set up a desktop manager. I am using VirtueDesktops. It allows me to have multiple desktops with themes. By default, one is called code. I set up Textmate to run on this desktop. On another I have Flash and on another I have Firefox. I can now switch to FF to test a change in code and switch back to the code desktop and Textmate never thinks it lost OS focus and thus the project drawer refresh never happens. Rock!!!

P.S. Textmate allows you to do a command+enter when working with a ActionScript file and it will make Flash the focused app and run a test movie. Very handy when working with classes and packages.


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6 Comments so far

  1. Anonymous on May 25, 2006 12:04 pm

    The project refresh lag time is a known problem and is being addressed in TextMate 2.0 (I think) which features a complete back-end overhaul.

  2. Anonymous on May 26, 2006 4:09 pm

    Os there a Textmate for 10.2 I use Textedit most of the time. But I have Windows95 which I run in classic.
    -joe

  3. dirtystylus » Blog Archive » TextMate/MTASC/XTrace Revisited on September 11, 2006 4:11 pm

    [...] A couple of months ago I switched over to TextMate as my full-time AS editor. Previously I’d been using XCode with the PixelConsumption AS 2 framework. Although Textmate doesn’t have the nice code-hinting of that XCode framework, it does have an Actionscript bundle and autocomplete for strings already present in your document. TextMate’s snippets have also proved useful, allowing me to set up skeleton code for common things like private/public methods. There’s even the ever-useful Command-Enter hotkey to kick you over to the Flash IDE for compiles. The only thing that drives me batty is the well-documented project drawer refresh issue with mounted drives (a nifty workaround is described here). [...]

  4. Jimmy on September 19, 2006 5:57 am

    Hey Mike,

    I was suffering under the Textmate Projext Drawer refresh lag as well and installed VirtueDesktop today, but it doesn’t work for me.

    When I switch Desktops, the apps on the last one actually DO lose focus, so nothing gained. Is there any special setting I might have to adjust for it to work?

    Cheers
    Jim

  5. mike on September 19, 2006 8:39 am

    I haven’t been using VirtueDesktops for a couple of months now so I am not sure of the exact setting. I remember it wasn’t a full proof solution by any means and even spoke to the creator of TextMate about this. Only for sure way is to not work off of a networked drive, or wait for the 2.0 release. Even if you do find the setting in VirtueDesktops to leave the apps in focus, there is still some lag time, but it lessens it. I eventually gave up on it, and started working locally and either setup a folder action to move any saved file to the network drive, or use RSync to sync the two directories. Hope that helps. Hopefully Textmate 2.0 is near release.

  6. Chris D on July 8, 2008 2:40 pm

    I know I’m super late for this party, but this’ll fix your problem:

    http://ciaranwal.sh/remate/

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