[JJB] ...if you hit “show scope” you sometimes see 4 or 5 levels of scope — for example SQL strings in PHP are scoped as SQL and are highlighted accordingly, but if you have a PHP variable in there, that’s scoped properly too — it’s just gorgeous. It’s a very sophisticated interaction one has with a text document. When you’re programming you know that the text has all this meaning. When you become a programmer, and as you become a better and better programmer, you become more aware of the different levels of meaning in a text document, and I think TextMate really brings that out.
[AO] And the more TextMate knows about your document, the more functionality you can actually hook up to it. For example commenting stuff– no matter which context you are in the commenting stuff will always do the right thing, as long as TextMate understands which context it’s in.
I absolutely love these particular TextMate features. The shortcuts stay the same, the bundles adapt their functionality according to the current scope.
Very insightful read about the development of TextMate. Allan also discusses some of the features he’s planning for the Leopard–only TextMate 2. (Via the TM Blog)