TextMate Emacs-like indentation (for R files)

If you use OS X, TextMate is hands down the best editor available for this platform. It integrate perfectly with the OS X environment. While the Project Window is probably the greatest thing about TextMate for the everyday user, its extensibility is what makes it a wonderful companion in editing.

The biggest complain I have about TextMate is that it does not handle indentation very well. I write a lot of R code and I am used to the indentation provided by ess (Emacs Speak Statistics). Frustrated, I decided to do something about it. After looking for option I realized that I could combine the feature of Emacs with those of TextMate to improve indentation. In practice I was able to use emacs (with ess) as beckend for the indentation. If you want to try follow the following steps:

1. Install ess (Emacs Speak Statistics) from http://ess.r-project.or in /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp;

2. In TextMate go to Bundles|Bundle Editor|Show Bundle Editor…

3. Create a new command, say Tidy

4. Add the following script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
my $in;
my $now = "tidyRcode";
my $file = "/tmp/tmptx_${now}.R";
my $eb=$ENV{'TM_BUNDLE_SUPPORT'};
open FILE, ">$file" or die "unable to open $file $!";
while () {
print FILE $_;
}
close(FILE);
`emacs -batch --eval "(require 'ess)" ${file} --eval '(indent-region (point-min) (point-max) nil)' -f ess-fix-miscellaneous -f save-buffer &> /dev/null`;
my $in = `cat ${file}`;
print $in;

5. Select the following options:

• Input: Selected Text or Document;
• Output: Replace Selected Text;
• Key Equivalent: Shift+Cmd+H;
• Scope Selector: source.r

You can see the picture below with my setting

Now you are ready to go. While you are editing R code, simply select and press Shift+Cmd+H and you will see your code….the ess way.