Robby on Rails

Early last year, I began to start creating a bunch of snippets and such for TextMate, all of which were lost several months ago due to Hurricane iSight. I recently decided to start building some again, especially some that sped up my RSpec writing. After creating a few, I wondered, “would anybody else on my team want to help me write some?” So, I thought that it was time to figure out how to share my bundle with others and allow them to add stuff to it… which seems like a good job for Ms. Subversion.

I couldn’t find a quick walk-through online and found myself in the #textmate IRC channel getting proper instructions. (thank you Allan!)

Create Your Bundle

In TextMate, you can open up the Bundle Editor and create a new bundle. Let’s call our custom bundle, RSpec. Go ahead and begin adding some snippets, commands, etc to your new custom bundle. Once you have something in your Bundle, you’ll want to reload your bundles, by going to Bundles > Bundle Editor > Reload Bundles. This will write your new bundle to disk to ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/.

    $ ls -al ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/
    total 0
    drwxr-xr-x   5 robbyrus  robbyrus  170 Feb 11 21:10 .
    drwxr-xr-x   4 robbyrus  robbyrus  136 Feb 11 20:11 ..
    drwxr-xr-x   5 robbyrus  robbyrus  170 Jan 12 16:58 PLANET ARGON.tmbundle
    drwxr-xr-x   3 robbyrus  robbyrus  102 Feb 11 21:10 RSpec.tmbundle
    drwxr-xr-x   4 robbyrus  robbyrus  136 Oct 21 13:38 Robby Russell???s Bundle.tmbundle

Importing your Bundle into Subversion

You’ll want to first import your new bundle into Subversion.

    $ cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/
    $ svn import RSpec.tmbundle/ -m "Initial import of RSpec (test) bundle" http://{respository_url}/{repository_name}/RSpec.tmbundle/
    Adding         RSpec.tmbundle/info.plist
    Adding         RSpec.tmbundle/Snippets
    Adding         RSpec.tmbundle/Snippets/new specification.tmSnippet

Great, now it’s in Subversion. Now, you’ll want to check it back out so that TextMate is running off of the version from Subversion.

The simplest way to do this is to delete your local copy and checkout the latest from Subversion.

    $ rm -rf RSpec.tmbundle/; svn co http://{respository_url}/{repository_name}/RSpec.tmbundle/
    A    RSpec.tmbundle/Snippets
    A    RSpec.tmbundle/Snippets/new specification.tmSnippet
    A    RSpec.tmbundle/info.plist
    Checked out revision 5.

All that you need to do now, is relaod your bundles again. Now that you know where the bundle files are stored, you can commit any changes as they are made.

Committing Bundle Changes

When you make changes to your TextMate bundle, you can do the following to commit your updates to the Subversion repository.

See Your Pending Changes

You can change directories to your custom bundle and run svn status.

    $ cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles/RSpec.tmbundle/
    $ svn status
    ?      Snippets/new context.tmSnippet

You’ll see that the new snippet that I created needs to be added to Subversion.

    $ svn add Snippets/new\ context.tmSnippet 
    A         Snippets/new context.tmSnippet

Now, let’s commit it to the repository.

$ svn ci -m "Adding new context snippet" 
Adding         Snippets/new context.tmSnippet
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 6.

At this point, all Subversion tips and tricks apply… so… it’s time to leave it to you to figure out the rest. :-)

TIP: Always reload your bundles before and after running svn update or svn commit

...and there you have it! You and your friends can (with a little work) share and develop your own custom bundles for TextMate. I’m hoping to get my teammates at PLANET ARGON to help me build a bunch for RSpec, which I’ll try to release into the wild soon. If anybody is already working on RSpec snippets and other TextMate hacks, please let me know.

UPDATE

Aslak kindly commented on this post and has pointed me to bundle available in the RSpec subversion repository, which I blogged about.) :-)

Happy hacking!