Textmate Next and Previous Tab Keys

If you’ve just upgraded to Revision 1616 of Textmate, you may be wondering why your next and previous file tab keys stopped working. The author of Textmate recently changed the next and previous file tab key shortcuts to the universal mac application equivalents. Here it is in the release notes:

[CHANGED] Change next/previous file tab key equivalents to shift command [ and ]. This has become the de facto standard.

I tried to deal with this for a few days but that keyboard shortcut is just too ingrained in my brain. You can fix this, though, by going in to your Keyboard preference pane, then the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab. Under "Application Shortcuts" click the plus button, find TextMate, and add the following:

TextMate Keyboard Shortcuts

Voila. Fixed! Now you can get back to coding at the speed of thought.

13 Responses to “Textmate Next and Previous Tab Keys”

  1. Ola November 14, 2010 at 9:42 am #

    Thanks, that was driving me crazy!

    Reply
  2. Travis November 14, 2010 at 12:00 pm #

    Yes! Strong work.

    Reply
  3. Craig November 14, 2010 at 1:15 pm #

    Thank god, this freaked me out completely

    Reply
  4. Tobi November 15, 2010 at 5:44 am #

    Cool! See this tiny apple script I wrote to automate the shortcut binding:

    http://www.rngtng.com/2010/10/29/applescript-to-create-keyboard-shortcuts/

    Reply
  5. Felix Andersen November 15, 2010 at 9:09 am #

    Thank you! Show stopper for me.

    Do not forget to change your keyboard batteries soon ;)

    Reply
  6. justin November 15, 2010 at 11:53 am #

    Thanks so much, I ended up changing mine to mirror Safari Cmd+Shift+Arrow. Since when is the bracket key the de facto standard for replacing the more obvious arrow keys?

    Reply
    • Jason November 15, 2010 at 11:55 am #

      I’m not sure but I know it’s been like that for a very long time. For most applications I think it works well enough — your hands dont have to move very far from the home row. For TextMate, however, it’s so ingrained in me to use those keys I can’t switch.

      Reply
  7. Phil Crissman November 15, 2010 at 2:08 pm #

    I’m maybe one of the few who had the opposite reaction; I remapped my TextMate tab-switching to cmd-shift-[ & cmd-shift-] over a year ago simply because those were the shortcuts for everything else in OS X, and I wanted them to be the same.

    Reply
  8. Jason Weathered November 16, 2010 at 8:59 am #

    Nice. Sane defaults are sane. No longer will I suffer with the arrow shortcuts when using somebody else’s machine (i.e. when pairing).

    Phil Crissman: You are definitely not alone. I also value consistent keyboard shortcuts.

    Reply
  9. Aurelio Jargas November 16, 2010 at 12:08 pm #

    Thank you very much. Searching Google and reading your post was faster than accessing my poor memory to remember how to change a keyboard shortcut in System Preferences :)

    Reply
  10. Danny November 17, 2010 at 1:20 pm #

    Thanks for the tip. That was driving me nuts and I wasn’t getting used to the new shortcuts.

    Reply
  11. theRemix November 18, 2010 at 6:27 am #

    thanks jason man. i thought i was going crazy!

    Reply
  12. Chris Adams November 18, 2010 at 11:50 am #

    Thanks – I was totally wrong footed by this too.

    Reply

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