puts Blog.new(”nonsense”)

Rob dared me to fire up my favorite shell and jump into the game. Imagine my disappointment when I was greeted with this bummer of an error message.

Hmm. No dice. OK, on to my second choice.

The result? A few well-known friends and some that likely deserve a bit of elaboration.

• m is an alias for the mate shell command for TextMate
• mman is that handy TextMate man page viewer we talked about recently
• The one that’s bleeped out (i.e., **) is an alias that takes me straight to the source dir for my current client project
• cap1 is, um, a reminder that deprec2 is gonna be a nice upgrade

Navigating through man pages in a terminal window doesn’t exactly rank as a highlight of this developer’s day. The experience feels like 1971 for a reason, and that means of interaction just leaves something to be desired. Perhaps you could make the argument that A) people that read man pages don’t rank humane interfaces as a top priority, or that B) I could spend more time mastering the ways to navigate via less (the default man page browser in OS X). But, believe it or not, apparently I’m not alone in my crazy desire to consult man pages outside of the terminal. So with web-based solutions, PDF generators, and full-blown apps dedicated solely to “manning up,” where should we turn? Queue The Pragmatic Programmer for some welcome words of wisdom:

Use a Single Editor Well

The editor should be an extension of your hand; make sure your editor is configurable, extensible, and programmable.

For me, that editor is undoubtedly TextMate. I already spend most of my day in TextMate, be it for coding, blogging, editing wiki pages (and other Safari-based content), or sometimes even writing e-mail. So, if I can use TextMate to find my way around a man page, that’s an all-around win.

Goal

While working in the terminal, be able to quickly open a man page in TextMate.

Making it happen

First, install the mate shell command. (Even if you have no interest in viewing man pages in TextMate, this command is simply indispensable for anyone that even occasionally ventures into the land of the terminal.)

Now that we have access to TextMate from the command line, we can assemble a quick script to get us the rest of the way toward achieving our goal. I keep all of my custom scripts in a .scripts directory that I include in my path, so I’ll define this handy scriptbaby in a file named mman (for “mate man”) in that directory.

And once we drop a bit of Unix-fu into that file, we’ll be good to go.

To see it in action, just use mman anywhere you would have previously used the vanilla man command.

Kicking it up a notch?

That approach has served me well for several months now, but in the course of writing this post, I came across an associated TextMate bundle that some folks may find helpful as well. The TextMate Man Pages bundle offers some (minor) syntax highlighting, the ability to open a man page from within TextMate, and the ability to use Command + Shift + T (i.e., “Go To Symbol”) to quickly find and access key sections of the man page by name.

Now go forth and devour some man pages already.

Graeme Rocher has assembled Groovy and Grails bundles for the splendid (and increasingly popular) TextMate editor for Mac OS X. These bundles offer a whole host of code snippets for common Groovy and Grails tasks, and as you might expect, the bundles provide some handy syntax highlighting as well. While these bundles are certainly useful for anyone working with Groovy and Grails in TextMate, they should be especially helpful for Groovy and Grails newbies.

"Hmmm. I need to iterate over each line in a file. How exactly do I do that in Groovy?"
–
Goes to TextMate menu…
–
Bundles –> Groovy –> Iteration –> Files & Streams –> eachLine

The developer finds the answer he needs without ever leaving the editor. (Less context switching equals greater productivity, so it's an all-around win.) In fact, it's really a great way to discover various Groovy and Grails features. Just by looking through the available code snippets, a developer can quickly check out all sorts of APIs and idioms he might not have otherwise known about. Of course, you're not required to use the menu to benefit from the code snippets; you can also tab through various code completion options. Sticking with the example above, you can type File, hit tab, and TextMate inserts the same code snippet we'd get from the menu.

If you're ready to give it a shot, just follow the pleasantly-simple installation process, and you'll be good to go.

1. Download and untar the tarball.
   
   
2. Copy the bundle files (Groovy.tmbundle and Grails.tmbundle) to ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles

jason> ls -l ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 5 jason jason 170 Nov 1 17:33 Grails.tmbundle
drwxr-xr-x 6 jason jason 204 Nov 1 17:33 Groovy.tmbundle
jason>

3. Fire up TextMate and start groovin'!

–

For more examples of what you'll get from these bundles, be sure to check out the initial release notes.

And, there's still more to come. Graeme points out that these bundles are a work in progress. In addition to more code snippets, future releases will likely provide the ability to execute a Groovy unit test directly from within TextMate, execute a Groovy script inside TextMate, etc.

If you have a chance to try it out, shoot a quick note to the Groovy mailing list with your thoughts (or post a comment here, and I'll be happy to pass it along).

– 

Update (2006-11-03)

Work in progress, indeed! Graeme has just added the ability to run Groovy scripts and Groovy classes from within TextMate.

To take advantage of these new features, first make sure you have Groovy installed and that your GROOVY_HOME variable is set. Then, just grab the current version of the bundle, install it, and you're ready to rock.

Once you've installed the latest bundle, open any Groovy file in TextMate, and hit Command + R to run the file in your editor.

Presenting…the gratuitous Hello World example…

Or, if you just want to execute the currently selected text, hit Command + Option + R to run just the selection.

Stay tuned for more updates as they come in. 

– 

Update (2007-01-13)

I modified the bundle links above to point to the locally hosted copy of the bundles, until such time that these bundles make their way to the official TextMate repository.  Thanks, Martin, for this suggestion. 

– 

Update (2007-01-28)

The bundles still have yet to make their way to the official TextMate repository, but the Groovy site is now hosting a page on TextMate integration.

– 

Update (2007-02-19)

At long last, the bundles have found a new home at the official TextMate repository.  Not only have they found a new home, but you'll also find some nice new features in the latest revision of the bundles.  So, if you previously fetched the bundles from anywhere other than the official TextMate repository, you'll likely want to upgrade to the latest version.