I’ve been playing around with TextMate 2 for a few days, trying to figure out the mountain of changes that have been made, and so far I’m pretty happy with it. Especially considering that it’s only an alpha, I’m getting a surprising amount of Real Work™ done with it.

One of the things that kept me from switching to a new and shinier editor has been my Ruby workflow, which makes extensive use of the RSpec bundle. I wrote a little formatter for it that can include logging with each spec that you can toggle on and off, and I find it to be a little more compact and readable than the default TextMate formatter.

Anyway, I just got the .tm_properties tweaks figured out that are necessary to make RSpec work in the new version:

If you’re using the WebKit formatter, or any other formatter for that matter, add this to the .tm_properties either in your $HOME (to apply it to all RSpec bundle output), or in a specific project’s .tm_properties file:

TM_RSPEC_OPTS        = '-rrspec/core/formatters/webkit'
TM_RSPEC_FORMATTER   = 'RSpec::Core::Formatters::WebKit'

I’m excited about the possibilities of tweaking the editor’s behavior on a directory-by-directory basis. TM2 still has some rough edges, and some stuff that’s missing or doesn’t work right, but I’m no longer worried that I’ll be disappointed by the final 2.0 release. Now, hopefully Alan won’t get too frustrated with all the bikeshedders and people that won’t read instructions.