A Couple of Usefule Snippets When Working with Textmate

Here is the snippet f path/to/directory 'search string' | open_in_mate This snippet (technically 2 snippets) will recursively scan the contents of files in a directory and then open all the files it finds in Textmate. It's useful on large projects where you would otherwise use a "find in project" feature. However, what's useful about the snippet is that it let's me narrow my search very quickly. Typically, I'll start w/ a broad search term... f path/to/dir "something" And I'll then narrow it down... f path/to/dir "something more specific" From the command line I can just hit the up arrow or "ctl+p" so I can very quickly refine what I'm looking for very doing. The "f" command is just an alias around ACK. I inverted the argument order so that I can hit "ctl+w" to erase the search term without having to retype the path. # in ~/.bash_profile function f { ack -i "$2" "$1"; } Then when I feel like I have found what I'm looking for, I'll pipe it to a little script I wrote

open_in_mate

The open_in_mate script will extract file paths from a blob of text and then runs the mate command, which opens up the file in Textmate if it exists. data = '' while $stdin.gets data << $_ end data.scan(/^app.\.(erb|rb|coffee|js|css|scss))/i).each do |f| f = f[0] if File.exists?(f) mate #{f} end end Note that I'm only looking for certain file type in a Rails app. You could make it more generic if needed.