Notes

Recommended Basic Textmate Settings

This is on Textmate 1.5.9 on Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard). These are just basic tweaks to make the editor slightly more useful and to avoid mixing tabs and spaces in code.

Tabs and Spaces

Please do this! Mixed tabs and spaces in code is irritating and screws up diffs and code display.

In the bottom of the document window click Tab Size: and select 4.

In the bottom of the document window click Tab Size: and select Soft Tabs (Spaces).

It should now read Soft Tabs: 4.

Text Display Preferences

From the Textmate menu select Preferences.

Click the General tab.

Select Highlight current line.

Select Show right margin indicator.

Click the Fonts & Colors tab.

I like the Slush & Poppies theme, but that’s just a personal preference.

If you're on Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) click Select… next to Font and choose Menlo, Regular, 12 pt. which is a much nicer fixed width font.

View Preferences

Line numbers make code navigation easier:

From the View menu select Gutter -> Line Numbers.

I also like to show invisibles:

From the View menu select Show Invisibles.

Perltidy and PBP

Recently I've been cleaning up some Perl code for release. I've been using perltidy as part of that process. Here's what I came up with for perltidy flags, a minor variation on those suggested by Perl Best Practices.

The original Perl Best Practices flags for perltidy combined with the PBP errata notes results in:

perltidy -l=78 -i=4 -ci=4 -st -se -vt=2 -cti=0 -pt=1 -bt=1 -sbt=1 -bbt=1 -nsfs -nolq -wbb="% + - * / x != == >= <= =~ < > | & **= += *= &= <<= &&= -="

Note that this is different than perltidy's -pbp flag! perltidy doesn't take into account the typo in the -wbb setting in PBP, which is corrected in the errata.

I removed the standard output and standard error output flags, bumped up the line length from 78 to 115, and adjusted the vertical tightness to always break a line after an opening token. The result:

perltidy -l=115 -i=4 -ci=4 -vt=0 -cti=0 -pt=1 -bt=1 -sbt=1 -bbt=1 -nsfs -nolq -wbb="% + - * / x != == >= <= =~ < > | & **= += *= &= <<= &&= -="

In summary, perltidy is a land of contrasts:

-l=115  # Max line length is 115 cols
-i=4   # Indent level is 4 cols
-ci=4  # Continuation indent is 4 cols
-vt=0  # Always break a line after opening token 
-cti=0 # No extra indentation for closing brackets
-pt=1  # Medium parenthesis tightness
-bt=1  # Medium brace tightness
-sbt=1 # Medium square bracket tightness
-bbt=1 # Medium block brace tightness
-nsfs  # No space before semicolons
-nolq  # Don't outdent long quoted strings
-wbb="% + - * / x != == >= <= =~ < > | & **= += *= &= <<= &&= -="
       # Break before operators