Commands

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posted by Martin Cohen in Features June 30th, 2006

Commands in Intype are the most different from TextMate. The reason is once again: LUA. In actual implementation they do not use special UI fields (see Shell Commands in TextMate) for setting save options, input / output options. Everything is done in command itself. LUA engine has full access to Intype API. You can control everything directly and in real time. Let’s have a look at this simple command which inserts a snippet into a new document:

local snippet = '<img src="${1:Input.selection()}" />'

Editor.newDocument(”HTML”)
Editor.insertSnippet(snippet)
Editor.saveDocumentAs(”my_document.html”)
Editor.closeDocument()

LUA has also access to a parser in Intype. So you don’t have to write your own parser for language-sensitive commands (such as Reformat text, Lowercase/Uppercase tags, Conversion or transformation to other language (HTML to Textile) and so. You also can use parser access to fire an auto-completition popup with explicit lexemes. So for example if you want to fire a list of variables, you just ask parser for it:

local list = Parser.getListByScope ("variable", 0, Editor.caretPosition());
Editor.popup(list);

Shell code, external scripts or executables are also available. LUA can execute them by OS.exec(command, params) function and capture output in a string which you can transform to a snippet (using regular expressions) and insert to a document, or just do whatever you need.