TextMate Oldie But Goodie Wrap-up

With November behind us, there’s now a month of TextMate productivity tips scattered across the twitterverse. In case you missed any of them, here’s a recap:

• November 1 - Use Control+Option+Command+V to view your clipboard history. Then hit Enter to paste the selected item into the current document.
• November 2 - Use Control+Shift+C to access the Math bundle from any file. Instantly perform calculations, add/subtract selected numbers, and more.
• November 3 - With your cursor on any Ruby string, use Control+Shift+' to toggle between single quotes, double quotes, and %Q{}. Also works with Groovy, JavaScript, Perl, SQL, Bash, etc.
• November 4 - In HTML (or HTML-friendly) files, select several lines and use Control+Command+Shift+W to wrap each line in a pair of HTML tags.
• November 5 - Control+Escape brings up the automation menu. Use it for quick access to the current bundle and to navigate through other bundles.
• November 6 - With your cursor on any Ruby symbol, use Control+: to change it to a string. Use Control+: again to toggle back to a symbol.
• November 7 - Folding is (almost always) evil and is triggered by accident more often than not. Turn it off in View -> Gutter -> Foldings.
• November 8 - For the rare occasion when you want folding, use F1 to fold the current block. Use Command+Option+n (where n is a digit) to toggle foldings at the nth level.
• November 9 - With your cursor on a misspelled word, use Option+F2 to bring up suggested spelling corrections. Hit Enter to choose a correction.
• November 10 - With your cursor on any ActiveRecord model, use Control+Command+Shift+S to instantly view the schema for that model.
• November 11 - When working w/ CSS, use Command+Shift+C to bring up the OS X color palette. Choose a color to insert the corresponding hex code.
• November 12 - Selection-fu => Use Control+W to select the current word. Use Command+Shift+L to select the current line.
• November 13 - Use Control+H to pull up the documentation for the selected word. Works for CSS attributes, Ruby methods, HTML tags, Javadoc, etc.
• November 14 - Anywhere that ERb is supported, use Control+> to produce a <%= %> sequence. Hit it again to cycle through the various flavors.
• November 15 - Need fast access to placeholder text? Type “lorem” and hit Tab.
• November 16 - Sometimes TextMate is too smart for its own good. Use Control+Command+V to paste without reindent. Especially useful for YAML.
• November 17 - Fun with case conversions - Control+U => TO UPPERCASE. Control+Shift+U => to lowercase. Control+Option+U => Convert to Titlecase.
• November 18 - Use Control+Tab to toggle focus between the editor window and the folder/file tree in the project drawer.
• November 19 - Don’t lose time waiting for “Find in Project” to slog through a large project. Search fast w/ Ack in Project.
• November 20 - Use Control+Option+Command+P to preview the current file as rendered HTML. Good for HTML (duh), Markdown, and Textile.
• November 21 - Command+Option+[ => Format current selection (or current line if nothing is selected) according to rules for the current grammar.
• November 22 - Use Option+PageUp and Option+PageDown to page up/down while keeping your cursor in the middle of the screen. (On a laptop, PageUp is Function+Up. So, for this tip, you’d use Function+Option+Up and Function+Option+Down.)
• November 23 - Use Command+Option+W to toggle soft line wrapping.
• November 24 - Hit Escape to auto-complete the current word using similar words in the current file (in order of their proximity to the cursor).
• November 25 - Enable “Edit in TextMate” to use TextMate from any Cocoa app - email in Mail.app, blog comments & wikis in Safari, etc.
• November 26 - Use Option+Command+R to feed the current file (or selection) to any shell command and capture the output in any number of ways.
• November 27 - Use Control+Option+Shift+H to change the language of the current file to HTML. Use ‘X’ for XML or XSL. ‘R’ for Ruby, Rails, etc.
• November 28 - Command+Shift+T => Go to symbol. This grammar-sensitive fuzzy finder locates classes & methods in Ruby, IDs in HTML, etc.
• November 29 - Hold down the Option key while selecting an area of text to make a columnar selection. More info here http://bit.ly/tmcol.
• November 30 - Forgot how to access a certain feature of TextMate. Quickly find any and all of the TMOBGOTD tips (and more) with Command+Shift+?

And if you’re still following along, you’re hardcore enough that you’ll want to make sure that the bonus inaugural entry is firmly tucked into your TextMate black belt as well:

• October 31 - Control+Command+T => Fuzzy find for bundle items.

Got a favorite TextMate tip of your own to share? Tag it with the worst acronym ever (TMOBGOTD - TextMate Oldie But Goodie Of The Day) for all the TextMate-lovin’ world to see.