How many of you out there use a Mac? How many use a PC? How many of you are aware of a text editor called Textmate (Mac) or e (Windows)?

From Wikipedia: “TextMate is a general-purpose GUI text editor for Mac OS X, created by Allan Odgaard. It provides users with innovative abstractions to support declarative customizations which are at once transparent and flexible.

Though its users are mostly programmers and its basic feature set may require more learning than simpler graphical editors, TextMate is much easier to customize than many other text editors. Notable features include tabs, recordable macros, folding sections and snippets, shell integration, and an extensible bundle system, all built around its novel scope system.”

So, why is this relevant? Well, for the last couple of weeks I have been working on CFTextmate - a Coldfusion bundle for textmate.

The long term goal of the CFTextmate project is to create a bundle for textmate and e (therefore covering both windows and Mac) providing support for both CFMX and Bluedragon. Additional features over time may well include Framework support, CFQuickdocs support, as well as a stack of common tasks familiar to CFML programmers.

Currently there are no milestone releases, but the bleeding edge version in svn is nearly CF8 complete, as well as containing a load of cool tweaks. Once this stage is complete a full v1 release will be announced.

So, if you have a textmate or e license, download the bundle and try it out. There’s an issue tracker on riaforge, as well as the discussion group on google groups. As always, any feedback/ideas are gratefully received.

http://www.cftextmate.org