TextMate ExpressionEngine Bundle
- April 05, 2006
- 66 comments
Several months ago, I made the switch from BBEdit to TextMate. I haven’t regretted that decision once. In fact, with each new update of TextMate, I become more confident I made the right decision.
I do quite a bit of work that involves ExpressionEngine, which has it’s own markup similar to XHTML. I wanted a way to easily differentiate between regular XHTML and EE markup. Thanks to the flexibility of TextMate, I was able to create a bundle that does just that, plus some.
You can see in the example to the right that all EE tags are highlighted for easy identification. It doesn’t highlight EE tags inside of quoted strings though, but that’s not a big deal.
Another feature you can see in the example is that I’ve included many snippets to make creating new templates much easier. In the example, I’ve typed in “entries” and hit the Tab key. Since there are three snippets that have that trigger, all three are listed and I can choose which one I want. I select the {exp:weblog:entries} tag and it adds in the basic structure that I need to get started. I can quickly tell it what weblog to use, what to disable and any other parameters thanks to how TextMate’s snippets allow for cursor placement. I’ve included over 50 snippets and plan to add some more soon.
Another really cool feature is shown below. You can select an EE tag and hit control-e to open up a small window showing the manual instructions for it. It will work on all standard tags that include “exp:” in them as well as a few others commonly used. It will not work with plugins since there’s no way I could easily keep up with all of them.
One that is set up a little different, and I use a fair amount is the time formatting entry. Instead of selecting the tag name, you select the “format” parameter and it will open up the manual to the time formatting instructions. I can never remember what the different options do, so this comes in quite handy.
Download the TextMate ExpressionEngine bundle.
April 30, 2006 - I’ve taken some time to polish up the bundle now. I’ve redone the entire language file in the bundle which makes for much better highlighting and code folding now. If you’d like to try it out, subscribe to the mailing list and look for a recent thread titled ‘ExpressionEngine bundle’. It’ll be attached to an email in the thread.
April 30, 2006 - I’ve now made it available for download on this site. If you use EE and TextMate, download the bundle and let me know what you think. Submit feature requests here too.
June 22, 2006 - I’ve uploaded a newer version of the bundle. No huge changes with this one, just a little organization in the bundle menu. If you’ve got some tags, templates or other features you’d like to see in the bundle, let me know.
Sept. 7, 2006 - The bundle has been updated to include EE comments, wiki tags, the improved embed tag, the simple commerce purchase tag and a few other additions. If you have anything else you’d like added to the bundle, or you’ve found a mistake, let me know.
June 6, 2007 - I’ve polished up a couple of the existing snippets, and added a few more that were missing. The biggest addition to this version is auto-completion of EE parameters. I believe I’ve got them all included. Let me know if I’ve missed anything.
Oct. 23, 2007 - Just a note to let Windoze users know that my bundle will work with e-Texteditor. You might get a lot of error messages when unzipping the file, but it should still work correctly.
Feb. 11, 2009 - Minor update. I’ve added some more parameters to the auto-completion list, and added the {wiki:categories_list} tag. I also added Dane Thomas’ EE comment preference to the bundle. Now you can easily wrap any code inside of an EE template in an EE comment ({!-- --}).
Stven Hambleton
November 18, 2007
matt spiel
June 21, 2008
Efrain
Miles Pearson
September 3, 2009
Robin
November 18, 2009
Are you selecting a tag before you try to look up the documentation on it? It sounds like you’re not. Make sure you’ve selected a tag (‘exp:weblog:entries’, not just ‘entries’), then look up the documentation.