One resource has been James Edward Gray II's book on TextMate published by the Pragmatic Programmers. I finally sat down and got serious about writing some automations of my own.
I've got to say that I'm pretty impressed by TextMate. At the last Raleigh.rb hack night I was talking to another vim user. I'd mentioned to him that you can extend TextMate easily in Ruby, without really having experienced it. Today, I wrote a neat little TextMate command to help in building Rails database test fixtures.
It acts like a tab triggered snippet, but it's a smart little critter. If I'm editing a fixture file, say 'test/fixtures/users.yml', I can type item then tab and it will produce the skeleton yaml for a new record, with:
- A dummy name selected for overtyping.
- The id set to the next available primary key Each column name as a yaml key ...
- ... A tabstop on a value which shows the column type
For example:
Suppose I've got a fixture file for a model called Item:
# == Schema Information # Schema version: 14 # # Table name: items # # id :integer(11) not null, primary key # description :string(255) # name :string(255) # price :integer(11) # # Read about fixtures at http://ar.rubyonrails.org/classes/Fixtures.html lotr1: id: 1 name: LOTR1 description: The Road Goes Ever On lotr2: id: 2 name: LOTR2 description: Introduction to Elvish
If I type a new line at the end of this file with the snippet command item and hit tab I see this:
lotr2:
id: 2
name: LOTR2
description: Introduction to Elvish
NameMe:
id: 3
description: string
name: string
price: integer
With NameMe selected so that I can easily replace it by typing. Note that the id was set to 3 since rows with ids 1 and 2 already exist.
Hitting tab again selects the first instance of string, and subsequent tabs step through the columns
Another feature which I won't show is that it looks at the table and if it doesn't have a primary key (e.g. for an association table in a has_and_belongs_to_many association), it won't generate the id: or a key.
You might be impressed, but I'm pretty happy with the results of a couple of hours of playing with TextMata and Ruby.
How it works.
The whole thing is done with a TextMate command implemented in Ruby. A few notes. First, it's just a coincidence that the snippet trigger is item and my example table is called items. Second, I'm not using the comments at the top of the fixture file which were generated when the model was created. The command works off of db/schema.db.
Here's the code:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby -w # # Created by Rick DeNatale on 2007-10-09. # Copyright (c) 2007. You may use this under the ruby license. $LOAD_PATH << "#{ENV['TM_SUPPORT_PATH']}/lib" require 'exit_codes.rb' class FixtureSnipGen attr_reader :rails_root, :table_name def initialize(fixture_file) match = %r{(.*)test/fixtures/(.*).yml}.match(ENV["TM_FILEPATH"]) @rails_root = match[1] @table_name = match[2] @no_id = false end def next_id max_id = 0 while line = gets claimed = %r{\s+id:\s+(\d+)}.match(line) max_id = [max_id, claimed[1].to_i].max if claimed end max_id + 1 end def gen_snippet cols = gen_columns if cols puts "${1:NameMe}:" puts " id: #{next_id}" unless @no_id puts cols.join("\n") else puts "Couldn't find #{table_name} in schema.rb" TextMate.exit_show_tool_tip end puts "$0" end def schema_file_name "#{rails_root}db/schema.rb" end def value_tab(text) @tab_stop += 1 (@tab_stop < 10) ? "${#{@tab_stop}:#{text}}" : " # #{text}" end def gen_columns # raise Exception.new("No schema file") unless File.exist?(schema_file_name) started = false @tab_stop = @no_id ? 0 : 1 result = [] File.new(schema_file_name).each do | line | if started break if %r{^(\s*)create_table\s+}.match(line) col_match = %r{\.column\s+\"(.*)\"\s*,\s*:(\w+)}.match(line) result << " #{col_match[1]}: #{value_tab(col_match[2])}" if col_match else started = %r{^(\s*)create_table\s+["']#{table_name}['"]}.match(line) @no_id = %r{:id\s+=>\s+false}.match(line) if started end end return result.empty? ? nil : result end end begin FixtureSnipGen.new(ENV["TM_FILEPATH"]).gen_snippet rescue Exception => ex puts ex TextMate.exit_show_tool_tip end
In the TextMate bundle editor, I just added a new command with this code, and set the following options:
- Save:
- Nothing
- Input:
- Entire Document - which pipes the entire textmate buffer for the file into stdin.
- Output:
- Insert as Snippet - which triggers TextMate to interpret the output as a snippet once the script has finished.
- Activation:
- Tab Trigger = item
- Scope Selector source.yaml - this only works within yml files.>
Finally note that although my example uses a table called items, it's just a coincidence that the tab trigger is item. It would be item in any fixture file.
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Welcome to the joy of TextMate! Just when you start feeling limited in TM is the same time you start exploring and discover how easy it is to extend it yourself. It is missing some things, like split views, but overall it is a very nice app with a good workflow. The sad thing is working in XCode after being seriously spoiled for TM’s key-bindings and triggers…