I’ve dreamed of the ability to ask TextMate “what frigging bundle command/snippet is being activated by Ctrl+P or Shift+Ctrl+G?” I’ve silently pined for it. (Answer:params[:id] in Rails, and all the Git bundle commands, respectively).
Really I’m an idiot because the correct thing to do is to ask on ##textmate, “is there a way to …?” but because I figured I knew everything about TextMate I just assumed you couldn’t search for bundle commands by their key combo.
I was pairing with chendo and he had obviously stopped listening to me monologuing about how to do TDD with Shoulda and was randomly clicking things on TextMate.
He found the following:
Find bundle items by key binding
Gold.
Updated image
Comments suggest that “what to do” isn’t clear above. My bad.
To get this working, there are 3 steps:
Press Ctrl+Cmd+To to bring up the “Select Bundle Item” box. This feature of Textmate is awesome. You can enter the text of a bundle item and it will try to find what you are looking for.
I’ve used sake intermittently in my workflow. It competes against me writing helper/admin scripts in my ~/ruby/bin folder. Normally, executable Ruby scripts have won. But I think I have a new solution that could make sake a permanent winner for me.
Ruby scripts are easy to create and execute. You just open new file, change the TextMate grammar to ‘Ruby’, type ‘rb’ and press TAB and you’re off and running (the ‘rb’ snippet generates #!/usr/bin/env ruby or a variation of that). You then make the file executable and BAM! you can run the script from any folder in your environment.
Sake tasks are more annoying to write. After creating a new file, you need to create the namespace and task wrappers for your functionality, such as:
namespace 'foo' do
namespace 'bar' do
desc "This task ..."
task :baz do
end
end
end
Your task isn’t instantly executable either. After each change, you need to uninstall the task (sake -u foo:bar:baz) and then reinstall the sake file (sake -i foo/bar/baz.sake) and then run it (sake foo:bar:baz). Perhaps there’s a way to inline edit a sake task, but I can’t see it from the help options.
But once you’ve got your script installed in sake, you get all the wonders that sake provides: a named list (with summary) of tasks (sake -T) and the ability to run those tasks anywhere. Ok, that’s really only one advantage over standard Ruby scripts. But I like it. Oh, namespacing. The baz task exists in a namespace foo:bar. That’s nice too.
So to make me happy, I need a solution to the dubious “create-install-execute” process above. I also want the raw source for all my sake tasks in one place so I can fix/add/change them, reinstall them and move on with my life. I want simple.
So I’ve forked Chris Wanstrath’s empty sake-tasks repo (mine) and added some infrastructure for managing sake tasks. Of course the repo itself is the repository for my sake tasks (which includes a lot from Luke Melia), but most importantly it has a single rake task to reinstall all the tasks without any manual fuss.
The rest of this article assumes you want to have your own repository for your own sake tasks hosted on github. This paragraph is probably unnecessary, but I don’t want to be accused of not being mildly thorough.
Fork the sake-tasks repo
For thoroughness and a chance to demonstrate some gold-medal git-fu, I’ll show two ways: fork my repo and forking the original repo from Chris and pulling my stuff into yours. It’s git, it’s distributed, you can do anything.
If you want to fork my repo and skip a nifty git lesson, go to my sake-tasks repo and click “fork”. Then follow the clone instructions as you normally do when you are blatantly, systematically duplicating someone else’s hard work, using a command that will look something like:
If you want to flex your git-fu, then go and fork Chris’ repo instead. Again, follow the clone instructions.
Now take a moment to reflect on just how empty your repository is. A fine moment in open-source where you’ve essentially cloned an empty repository. Hardly worth the effort, but since Chris is a creator of github then if he creates an empty repository then who am I to disagree. Empty it shall start.
Now let’s pull in the code and tasks from my repo. My repo could be any git repo anywhere on the tubes.
One way you could pull my code into your local repository is to add my repo as a remote and then pull in the goodness:
If you get occasional pull requests for your projects, then the latter option is handy to know.
Your local repo is now different to your remote repo (your fork on github) so push it back to your remote:
git push origin master
Installing the sake tasks
I originally created my sake-tasks fork so I could store a git:manpages:install task. I’ve just upgraded to git 1.6 (note to self: I want an ‘upgrade to latest git version via src’ task; UPDATE the repository now includes a git:src:install task to do this) and found some instructions for installing the pre-built manpages. Then I got over excited and refactored all of Luke Melia’s git+mysql+ssh tasks in to my repo so it looked like I’d done a lot of work.
To install all the tasks, first install sake:
sudo gem install sake
Then run the install task (check below for the list of tasks to be installed):
WARNING: This will uninstall any tasks you already have by the same name.
rake install
Now, check that your sake tasks are installed:
sake -T
Gives you:
sake git:analyze:commits:flog_frequent # Flog the most commonly revised files in the git history
sake git:close # Delete the current branch and switch back to master
sake git:manpages:install # Install man pages for current git version
sake git:open # Create a new branch off master
sake git:pull # Pull new commits from the repository
sake git:push # Push all changes to the repository
sake git:status # Show the current status of the checkout
sake git:topic # Create a new topic branch
sake git:update # Pull new commits from the repository
sake mysql:dump # Dump the database to FILE (depends on mysql:params)
sake mysql:load # Load the database from FILE (depends on mysql:params)
sake ssh:install_public_key # Install your public key on a remote server.
Sexy.
Adding new recipes/tasks
The installer rake task rake install works by assuming that each .sake file contains one sake task. This allows the rake task to uninstall the tasks from sake first, and then re-install it (sake barfs if you attempt to reinstall an existing task). Without the one-task-per-file rule, the solution would be to load all the sake tasks as rake tasks into memory. But I like one-task-per-file; it seems clean.
So, to create a task foo:bar:baz, you’ll need to add a folder foo/bar and create a file baz.sake inside it. Within that file you would then specify your task using namespace and task method calls:
namespace 'foo' do
namespace 'bar' do
desc "This task ..."
task :baz do
end
end
end
To install new tasks or reinstall modified tasks, just run the rake task (rake install or rake).
TextMate users
The latest Ruby.tmbundle on github includes a task command that generates the above namespace/task snippet based on the path + file name. That is, inside the foo/bar/baz.sake file, make sure your grammar is ‘Ruby’ or ‘Ruby on Rails’ and then type “task” and press TAB. The above snippet will be generated ready for you to specify your task.
Summary
So now I have a single place for all my original sake source and a simple rake task to re-install the tasks if I add or modify them. And because its all in one git repo, if other people fork it and add their own tasks then I can steal them.
I didn’t know you could run Ruby within TextMate snippets. As a consequence, a lot of the TextMate bundles I work on either have simplistic Snippets or the advanced code is run via Commands with code pushed into explicit Ruby files in the Support folder.
But sometimes I just want a clever snippet. For example, I want the ‘cla’ snippet to use the current filename to create the default class name instead of the current ‘ClassName’ default. I want default foreign key names to be meaningful.
I’ve now figured this out (thanks to Ciaran Walsh), and …
Um, lost already? Ok, let me show you via screencast on Snippets and Commands with Ruby (QuickTime (11Mb)):
In addition, there is the latest TextMate for Rails 2 Peepcode written by myself and spoken by Geoffrey Grosenbach. Its cheap at $9, good value at $15.50, and perhaps overpriced in the $20-$30 range. Lucky its only $9.
The snippets used throughout the video
The current Ruby.tmbundle snippet (activated via ‘cla’):
class ${1:ClassName}
$0
end
An attempt to use regular expressions to convert the filename to a classname:
class ${1:${TM_FILENAME/[[:alpha:]]+|(_)/(?1::\u$0)/g}}
$0
end
The final snippet, with embedded Ruby to do the heavy lifting (note: added ’singluarize’ to the snippet):
class ${1:`#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require "active_support"
puts ENV['TM_FILENAME'].gsub(/\.rb$/, '').camelize.singularize
`}
$0
end
Add this to your own Ruby.tmbundle, or clone mine (which is a clone of the original subversion repo).
Sometimes when you are perusing code you ask the question: why the hell is that there? or why does this even work?
Now you can instantly navigate from that erroneous line to the git commit where it was added, and then using github’s commenting system add a full-flavoured remark about that person’s code. I’m not sure if profanity is against the GitHub Terms of Service, but I’d rather ask forgiveness than permission.
There is an editor for Windows – E-TextEditor – that was designed to support TextMate bundles. So far, the GitHub bundle doesn’t use any special features of TextMate’s latest-and-greatest UI libraries, so it should be usable on E-TextEditor.
Also, a VIM project has been created to port the GitHub bundle, by Christoph Blank. Cristoph can be found hanging around #hobo on irc as ’solars’, if you want more goodies in the VIM bundle.
I wanted to go from a source file to the equivalent file on github. I wanted a selection of lines in TextMate editor to also be selected when I was taken to github.com. I wanted to cut back on my senseless killing of innocent pasties.
