The TextMate Manual was recently published and I made some time today to go through it. I always seem to work with an editor for far too long before I realize there’s some handy shortcut I’ve been ignorant of. Anyways, an editor like TextMate is full of these hidden gems—clever macros and commands that make life easier. Here are a couple of things I didn’t know.
CMD-T: Go to File
Until this moment, I had no idea the ‘Go to File’ window existed, let alone its CMD-T shortcut. I hate taking my hands off the keyboard to click on files in the project drawer, so the ‘Go to File’ command makes my day. It opens a window containing a flat list of all the files in your project, with a live, abbreviation-enabled search.
[This] window lists all text files in the project sorted after last use, which means pressing return will open (or go to) the last file you worked on. So using it this way makes for easy last-recently-used switching.
CMD-Return: Save some keystrokes
You know how when you type an auto-paried character, like a quote, or a brace, your caret ends up in between the pair? Well, this is generally useful, but really sucks when you’re at the end of a line because you have to move all the way to the end before making a carriage return. You can imagine my excitement when I learned about CMD-Return. CMD-Return will move to the end of the line and insert a newline for you. How great is that?
