Create Commands in TextMate Using PHP

By  on  
TextMate Logo

TextMate is the best thing to enter my programming life since MooTools. TextMate is extremely flexible and contains a host of functions that make my programming time much more efficient. Snippets, commands, macros -- TextMate has it all. And when a command or snippet doesn't exist, write it yourself! In what language? Any language installed on your system! TextMate's so flexible that you can write commands in the language you feel most comfortable in.

The Textmate Command / PHP

The first thing we do is tell the command "textarea" that our command is going to be coded in PHP:

#!/usr/bin/env php

Next we read in the content of the current buffer:

<?php
	$content = file_get_contents('php://stdin');

Then...we add any PHP we want to modify the buffer contents. When the buffer content has been modified as desired, you echo out the content and the buffer's content is replaced:


//do whatever you want here
$content = str_replace('MooTools','MooTools FTW!',$content);

//echo out modified content
echo $content;

?>

Here's an image of the screen so you have a visual.

TextMate Bundle Editor

Have any TextMate commands you've created? Email them to me at david@davidwalsh.name and I'll share them on this blog in the future!

Recent Features

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us.  Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos.  Another technology available...

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Introducing MooTools LinkAlert

    One of my favorite Firefox plugins is called LinkAlert. LinkAlert shows the user an icon when they hover over a special link, like a link to a Microsoft Word DOC or a PDF file. I love that warning because I hate the surprise...

  • By
    Prevent Page Zooming in Mobile Browsers

    Ever since I got my iPhone, I've been more agreeable in going places that my fiancee wants to go. It's not because I have any interest in checking out women's shoes, looking at flowers, or that type of stuff -- it's because my iPhone lets...

Discussion

  1. EmEhRKay

    Great stuff. I too recently got into extending textmate, it seems pretty straight forward.

    One thing that I want to do is create a code completion command taht will allow you write a class name and it would offer up the public[static] methods with their arguments. Dion Almaer’s project functions command is what got me interested. This should be easy to accomplish with PHP5’s reflection objects. My only worry is caching of found results etc. I’ll share with the world if I ever figure it out.

  2. can i use Textmate in windows ?

  3. @haberler you can use e text editor as i’m using it.

  4. ray

    @haberler: textmate only mac os x ,in windows you can use intype or e-texteditor

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!