Sep 04
2010

I’m on a roll with stupid scripts today, but it’s Saturday… so, whatever. This is a quick command for creating semantic <abbr> tags in TextMate. It’s short, but pretty smart: if your text is a mix of upper and lowercase letters, it will take the uppercase letters, in order, and create an acronym from them and insert an <abbr> tag, using the original input as the title…

Aug 13
2010

I love the keyboard, and I love keyboard shortcuts. It’s one of the reasons TextMate and I get along so well. There’s one thing that bothers me any time I’m editing text (in any application), though: having to move my right hand all the way over to the arrow keys just to move forward a couple of characters, say, after an auto-paired set of parenthesis that I want to get out of.

Aug 05
2010

Yesterday, I posted a quick TextExpander snippet for inserting placeholder images into an HTML layout using placehold​.it. I took a minute today to convert this to a TextMate snippet as well, and wanted to share it as I find it immensely useful.

Jul 08
2010

A good friend of mine, Christina Warren, just published a piece on Mashable / Dev & Design about TextMate themes, and it warms my heart to know there are other people as dedicated to this aging text editor as I am. She also made her collection available on GitHub, so check that out if you’re in the market for a new look.

Jun 19
2010

Just a quick hit on this one… when hacking away at the styles of things one probably shouldn’t be hacking away at, embedding images right in the CSS is a handy trick. It’s done by Base64 encoding the image, removing line breaks from the resulting string, and using it to set the background property for the CSS rule.

Nov 12
2009

This is a quick and dirty Snow Leopard Service that scrapes Songza​.fm to find a song related to your selected text in most applications. It replaces the selected text with an is​.gd shortened link and the name of the first song it found (just to be sure you’re on the same page… literally). The code is also available as a TextMate command for those interested. Update: TextMate…

Nov 03
2009

It may take me a while to convert my setup back to the old days of TextMate blogging. I’ve primarily been blogging for TUAW, which uses a blogging system with very poor XMLRPC support. The end result of this, for me, was the development of an elaborate TextMate bundle which emulated the ease-of-use that TextMate provides to bloggers on WordPress (and other platforms). I have…