blog/published/2006.02.21-textmate-insert-text-into-self-down.md

Title: TextMate: Insert text into self.down Date: February 21, 2006 Timestamp: 1140562500 Author: sjs Tags: textmate, rails, hacking, commands, macro, rails, snippets, textmate Styles: typocode

UPDATE: I got everything working and it's all packaged up here. There's an installation script this time as well.

Thanks to a helpful thread on the TextMate mailing list I have the beginning of a solution to insert text at 2 (or more) locations in a file.

I implemented this for a new snippet I was working on for migrations, rename_column. Since the command is the same in self.up and self.down simply doing a reverse search for rename_column in my hackish macro didn't return the cursor the desired location.

That's enough introduction, here's the program to do the insertion:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
def indent(s)
  s =~ /^(\s*)/
  ' ' * $1.length
end
up_line = 'rename_column "${1:table}", "${2:column}", "${3:new_name}"$0'
down_line = "rename_column "$$1", "$$3", "$$2"\n"
# find the end of self.down and insert 2nd line
lines = STDIN.read.to_a.reverse
ends_seen = 0
lines.each_with_index do |line, i|
ends_seen += 1    if line =~ /^\send\b/
if ends_seen == 2
lines[i..i] = [lines[i], indent(lines[i])  2 + down_line]
break
end
end
# return the new text, escaping special chars
print up_line + lines.reverse.to_s.gsub('[$`\]', '\\\1').gsub('\$\$', '$')

Save this as a command in your Rails, or syncPeople on Rails, bundle. The command options should be as follows:

• Save: Nothing
• Input: Selected Text or Nothing
• Output: Insert as Snippet
• Activation: Whatever you want, I'm going to use a macro described below and leave this empty
• Scope Selector: source.ruby.rails

The first modification it needs is to get the lines to insert as command line arguments so we can use it for other snippets. Secondly, regardless of the Re-indent pasted text setting the text returned is indented incorrectly.

The macro I'm thinking of to invoke this is tab-triggered and will simply:

• Select word (⌃W)
• Delete (⌫)
• Select to end of file (⇧⌘↓)
• Run command "Put in self.down"