rod mclaughlin

TextMate is worse than useless (05 jun 12)

http://jasonseifer.com/2009/08/05/getting-rspec-and-textmate-to-play-nice

'Textmate' is the editor preferred by Ruby on Rails developers. It only runs on Apple Mac, but that's what they like.  

It's cheap. But vi is free. So what's the advantage of TextMate? It's not a full-fledged 'IDE' like IDEA or Visual Studio, but it does have lots of windows and menus. 

It also has 'Bundles'. This is where you try to get it to do something other than edit files. 

According to the above blog, if you follow the instructions at

http://jqr.github.com/2009/02/06/textmate-rspec-and-dot-spec-party.html

you can run 'RSpec' tests from within TextMate.

Pretty sweet right? Let’s get started.
Install RSpec bundle
mkdir -p ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/
git clone git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec-tmbundle.git RSpec.tmbundle
osascript -e 'tell app "TextMate" to reload bundles'

But it didn't work.

'RSpec' doesn't appear in the 'Bundles' menu.

But I can still type 'rake spec' in a console window, so no worries. 

I still don't understand the advantages of inaccurately-documented software. 

On Windows and Linux, there are various editors which autosave (why would you NOT want to autosave all open files all the time?). IDEA is a particularly good example. The Ruby version is called 'Rubymine'. But, amazingly, TextMate doesn't have autosave capability. To make it autosave, you have to install another app, which has a thirty day free trial, and after that you have to pay for it. And it doesn't conform to the instructions. It doesn't have "When should Eversave save?" in the Preferences:

http://wiki.macromates.com/Main/Howtos#TimedAutoSave

As a result, TextMate doesn't interact well with the command line. I frequently run command-line commands which change various files. When I go back to TextMate, it might say '34 documents have changed on disk - should I revert or save the TextMate versions?'. This is so error-prone, it makes TextMate worse than useless.

Portland

London