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Editing blog posts with TextMate

February 27th, 2007 by Mark · No Comments

If you use TextMate on Mac OS X (and if you don’t I would thoroughly recommend you try it: it is by far the best editor I have ever used) and maintain a blog, then it is possible to create blog entries using TextMate.

There are two different approaches. As with any powerful software, there are always many ways of achieving the same goal, and somewhat depends on personal preferences.

Option 1. Using TextMate as an editor in any Cocoa application

Using these instructions one can install TextMate as an input handler in Mac OS X, and its editing services will be made available to all Cocoa applications, including Apple’s Mail and Safari programs.

I can now create blog entries by navigating to the medicalnerds.com administration site, and typing CTRL-CMD-E in the textbox. From here, the contents of the textbox are transferred into TextMate, and will be transferring back once I “Save”.

TextMate is a great editor, and comes with many different “bundles” supporting different modes of working, for example HTML, LaTeX, C, Java etc. etc.

How to install

  • Run TextMate
  • Type CTRL-CMD-T to “select bundle item”
  • Type “Install” and/or select the “Install Edit in TextMate” option
  • Read the documentation, and then select the “Install” options
  • Quit and restart Safari
  • Test it out! Go to a textfield and type CTRL-CMD-E

There are other tips and tricks for TextMate users here.

Option 2: The TextMate blogging bundle

TextMate has a dedicated blogging “bundle” that allows one to post directly to a blog from within TextMate. Once your blogs are configured, you can create a new post, fetch old posts for editing and preview a blog post all from within TextMate. In fact, I’m using TextMate to write this entry at present. And of course, I get access to all of the sophisticated editing facilities provided by TextMate, including coloured HTML markup, spell-checking, short-cuts and validation.

Tags: Software

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