Suggestions

Preferences

Compiled from Suggestions.Other

Placement

May be easier to find if placed in the preferences panel:

  • Check Spelling as You Type (v1031, Edit menu)
  • Edit Bundles/Languages (v1031, Bundle menu)

Projects

  • Always show project drawer (checkbox)
  • Always open project drawer on [left|right]
  • Hide project drawer on start up

Printing

See dreamweaver or textedit for examples. Suggetions by Jon, mrevelle, others

  • Print Selection (added to file menu) -jbondo

Page Setup (state saved)

  • Preserve Folding
  • Print Line Numbers
  • Page Size (Letter/Legal/etc)
  • Page Orientation (Portrait/Landscape)
  • Header/Footer formatting
  • Font Familly (different than screen)
  • Font Size (different than screen)

The headers and footers are really cool, but saving the preferences for them seem to be highly confused and buried in the Print interface. Named styles encapsulating all of these would be great.
-- Leon Spencer

I'd like to second this. I'm always disappointed going from the very pretty on-screen display of my code to the printout.
-- Anthony Cowley

I'll third this! Also, please include colour printing so that it prints the pretty syntax highlighting colours. I always have to print from Xcode for my coursework.
-- David Winter

I'll fourth this! Even a Page Setup menu where I could set the print percentage would work for me as I'm just a simple human being.
-- Joachim

Make that five for a separate font selection for printing and the option to preserve the syntax highlighting and print in color.
-- petef

Six! -- Joris Machielse

Seven!
-- Matt Kern

Change font size for printing; a good screen size is always too large in print.

Please, please, please... Separate font size for printing please!
--Vlad D

Ten!
-- Mike O.

Color Output / Syntax Highlighting

(Note that you can achieve highlighted printing via ⌘⌃T, Create HTML From Document, ⌘⌥⌃P, ⌘P )
-- Jonathan del Strother

I'd also very much like to see the option to print with syntax highlighting.
-- Noah

Let me add my voice to the chorus requesting color printing of syntax highlighting.
-- jgarber

Yet another request for color printing. It would be nice to be able to choose a color theme for editing and another one for printin (avoiding the inherent problems that will occur with dark background schemes)
-- Jean-Pierre Martineau, satisfied customer

It might make more sense to use an inverted color scheme if the background is dark, instead of just using a different color scheme. I only suggest this because some styles are more complete than others.
-- Alex Kadis

Color printing to preserve the highlighted syntax. This needed to be a seperate item...it is very important to me.
-- Alec

I'll second all three of those printing requests! V. important.
-- petef
I'm with petef, though in order of importance: colorized printing, saved page setups, then preserve folding when printing.
-- Matt Kern

Preserve folding when printing

I'd be interested in preserving folding when printing. Today for example, i needed to look at some code, but there was a lot of extraneous stuff in the file that i could fold away and get it out of my brain. But when printed, the folded blocks re-expanded, and i (potentially would have) wasted a lot of paper. Thanks, Bob Kuehne

I'd really like to see this too. TIA.
-petef
Great idea, me too.
-Ben P
Great idea, but could be confusing. I'd go with this only if it wasn't easy to accidentally print folded code when not wanted.
-matt

Prevent file-changed detection

Can we have an option to prevent TextMate from trying to detect if a file has changed? A "Slow Filesystem" option? Even something I could set from the command line would do. This project (which could not be more important) is due next Thursday and I've no way to edit things on a local FS.
-jm

I have a crazy project that requires I edit files in a filesystem that is mounted over WebDAV -- very slow filesystem. TextMate works great for this except that TextMate seems to re-scan all files in a project (or some other kind of filesystem access) whenever application focus is lost and returned. This results in a delay of about 15 seconds of pinwheeling before I can continue editing.
I'm experiencing the same problem with samba. Actually, every project we work on here is accessed via a samba share, so unless this is fixed, it makes textmate barely usable for me.
-jk
Ditto for me. I may try to work around it by setting everything up on my mac and working locally but it would be nice to be able to use my development server and not have to use this work around.
-Rick Gigger
I also have the same problem. This is a very high priority for me to get fixed.
-David Balatero
Same problem here. But the system I'm using takes a whole minute to rescan the six files!
-Graham Stratton
Please! This is my only frustration with TextMate and it is so frustrating at times that I'd rather ftp and open file-by-file, which is not very efficient.
-DS
Yes, please!! This makes working on a remote filesystem in the LAN very frustrating, and impossible if the share is further away. And now that we have macfuse , it's too bad we can't use sshfs with Textmate!
-Chase Taggart
Same problem here. sshfs is a really useful tool, it really is too bad that Textmate doesn't work with it.
-Vincent Murphy
Same here, another vote for this one.
-Elan Feingold
YAMTV (Yet another Me too Vote). I edit directly from a samba share, which is pretty much a requirement for my job. I have to wait 15-20 seconds everytime I tab out to a Terminal and tab back it. It's unworkable. :(
-Randy P
And another vote for this. I too use sshfs.
-André Cruz
Strongly agree. I use sshfs too, and as my projects get larger, it becomes pretty unusable.
-Adam Atlas
By the way, I just made a quick-and-dirty SIMBL bundle that causes TextMate to not check the files for updates upon reactivation. Safe if you can assume that the files won't get edited elsewhere. If anyone wants a copy until Macromates (hopefully) addresses this, email me - adam at atlas dot st.
-Adam Atlas
Yeah, this makes working over sshfs somewhat painful. Ideally the update-check wouldn't be disabled, but would just run in a background thread...
-Eric Moon
Argh! I've just been exposed to the beauty of textmate but as I have to work remotely (sshfs works wonders) this "feature" makes it impossible to work and remain sane. Back to Emacs.... If this is solved please make a note in the release notes so I know when to buy the license.

Keep up the good work! - Dario Matos

An option like that would be really, really nice. As a matter of fact I am currently hesitant to buy TextMate as I need/like to edit files regularly on remote servers. Otherwise I am very impressed by TextMate!

- Harm A

I could really use this, the size of my projects makes TextMate unusable when I try to use it this way.

-Justin C

Another vote for a preference to prevent file-changed detection (on a per-project basis, ideally).

-RP

I've been trying to edit a project with about 250 files in it. The 15 second lag every time I focus the screen is very frustrating. I presume TextMate touches every file in the project tree. For starters, instead of just disabling the feature, is there some way it can do lazy checks? For instance, only check the files I have open, then only the folders I have expanded, then (maybe) the rest of the tree. Someone else mentioned doing the check in another thread so it doesn't hold up the entire interface.
-Roberto A
Please implement a feature like this! I too have to work remotely over sshfs on a project, and it's literally unbearable using Textmate, because of the file scanning in question. This is THE ONE thing I really wish to have in Textmate, the ability to turn file changes scanning off. Please fix it!
- Leo R. Lundgren
Please fix this / have a switch to turn it off. It is a pain to work as the files are all on remote servers and using the workaround of going through subversion is too much hassle. Don't want to switch always back to emacs because of this...
- Malte Sussdorff

Per document/MIME/extension themes

Would be nice to add a preference section which would allow setting syntax coloring themes per language.

I'm (Joshua Lock) seconding this and expanding upon it. I'd like this because I work in a variety of languages and have yet to find/create a theme that plays nicely with all of them. Furthermore I'd like to edit plain text (non-source) files in TM from time to time but find this difficult under the moajority of themes. Ideally I'd have a plain theme (just black on white) for standard text files such as README's etc.

I (Tolmark) second language specific syntax coloring.

Remove trailing whitespace on save

The only thing I miss about UltraEdit: there was a preference to trim extra whitespace from the end of each line upon save. It felt like you were saving electricity or something, getting rid of all those unseen spaces. You could retire after that.

I would second this too but I would like the featuer with a twist. I hate accidental extra white space at the end of real lines. But some lines are just a bunch of tabs holding the current indentation level because there is no actual text on the line. I wouldn't want this removed because then I have to tab in all the time to get the line back to where it should be. No editor does this right in my opinion. It would be awesome if textmate became the first. - Rick Gigger

.Mac Sync

Since I use TextMate on several macs I would like to see a feature that uses the new .Mac preference synchronisation to fetch all of my bundles and visual changes. Transmit has a similar feature for favorites. -Andre F

I agree since I also use multiple macs with TextMate. Would be better to also be able to sync with an ftp server, for those of use who don't use .mac

I also think .mac synchronization is a rather valuable feature. Panic software added it to Transmit to sync ftp favorites and was an instant time saver. It would certainly make life easier on TextMate. Also be sure to remember files like the blog list and other future bundle preferences.

I agree with all of the above. Sync'ing Textmate across multiple machines has always been somewhat of a problem for me. Transmit's .Mac integration is great and I'd love to see similar functionality in TextMate both in terms of bundles and themes. --Roshambo

(addressed) save when you lose focus

I love the "save when you lose focus" preference, but getting "pick somewhere to save this file" requests when the file isn't saved yet is annoying. Can we have "resave when you lose focus" rather than "save as when you loose focus"? -- Douglas (happy TM user!)

It no-longer saves untitled buffers
-- Allan Odgaard

(addressed) auto-download of updates

Please (re-)add the option to turn off auto-download of updates. I would like to be able to choose when I do an update and when it is downloaded. Thanks :)

It is now possible.
-- Allan Odgaard

--

Use with multiple browsers

In the gutter that shows your projects files, when right clicking a file you can open it in "safari" (or I expect your default browser) I prefer to use safari for browsing and firefox for developing ui intensive web apps (firebug, anyone?). A pref to be able to specify the browser that you'd like in the menu would be nice.

View File As Syntax Highlighting

When I view a file such as *.mine due to a SVN conflict, I need to be able to manually choose how I want that file to highlight. Right now it's all black/white and is hard to separate what needs to be merged. In addition, it would be great if it knew that a .mine extension or *.r[0-9]+ was due to a SVN conflict, and removes that part to determine what syntax highlighting is needed.