Lately, as I’ve been working on a huge Zend Framework library for rapid website development and content management, as well as the second version of my ASRA framework, I’ve been very into using Soryu’s TextMate TODO plugin. Trouble is, when you have the entire Zend library in your project (or any other huge library), you’re bound to have a ton of todo’s in your list that you don’t really “care” about.

Anyway, I just learned a super easy way to speed up and make things easier to maintain. Simply open the TextMate preferences menu and go to Advanced > Shell Variables. Add a new entry called TM_TODO_IGNORE and give it a value of Zend* (or even just Zend should work). The TM_TODO_IGNORE value just specifies a regular expression for files paths to ignore within your project, so basically this just ignores everything in the Zend library. Yay! Concise to-do list!

I've been doing a ton of work with the newest Zend Framework version 1.8.2 this weekend. I've found that typing out all the requires for each class can be a pain, so I made a quick TextMate snippet to make adding @see directives for phpdoc at the same time as the require_once directive. Here it is; simple but useful:

/**
 * @see $1
 */
require_once "${1/_///g}.php";$0

Add this as a "Tab Trigger" for the word "see" then just type "see" and hit tab then type your class name. It will auto fill the comment and the path to the pear-conventionally-named .php file. Got any other useful TextMate snippets? Please do share!

I’ve recently been getting doing some development in XCode and Interface Builder (learning the iPhone SDK). I found XCode a real pleasure to work with (especially its unique form of “Code Sense”), but I did miss some of TextMate’s default text shortcuts, specifically “delete line” and “duplicate line.” There are some Key Binding options in the Preferences but nothing like those.

I asked a question on StackOverflow, a great new wiki/forum/help site for programmers and was pointed to the Cocoa docs and some useful posts where I figured out how to put together these simple key bindings. Results follow.

Create the file ~/Library/KeyBindings/PBKeyBinding.dict if it doesn’t exist and add the following to the file:

{
    "^$K" = (
        "selectLine:",
        "cut:"
    );
    "^$D" = (
        "selectLine:",
        "copy:",
        "moveToEndOfLine:",
        "insertNewline:",
        "paste:"
    );
}

The above snippet creates a key binding for “^$K” (Control-Shift-K – aka TextMate’s “delete line”) and “^$D” (Control-Shift-D – AKA TextMate’s “duplicate line”). You can see there’s loads of different macro’s you can add to this file to make unique key binding snippets. Note that they won’t take effect until you restart XCode.