How to add TextMate to my PATH on Mac?

Question

When you start using TextMate, you are instructed to create an alias for mate='open -a TextMate.app'. But now I am using another program that requires me to add it to the PATH. I'm not sure how to do it though. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

My TextMate installation includes Terminal Usage... item in the Help menu, that allows me to install a symlink in a directory of my choice, the default being /usr/local/bin. This seems to be the preferred way to do this, as it is accessible from within TextMate itself.

Answer 2

mate is actually a utility that comes with TextMate. It is located at /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/Resources/mate. The easiest way to add it to your path is to create a symlink to it:

ln -s /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/Resources/mate ~/bin/mate

Then add ~/bin to your path by adding the following line in your ~/.profile:

export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH

More details can be found in the TextMate Manual. Info such as this:

Mac OS X comes with an open shell command which can be used to simulate a double click from within Terminal. It can also perform an Open With… operation by use of the -a argument, e.g.: open -a TextMate . will open the current folder in TextMate (as a scratch project).

This standard command has a few shortcomings: it can only open one file at a time, it cannot open a document at a specific line and it cannot “stall” the shell until the file has been closed, which is useful e.g. when using an editor to write something like a subversion commit message.

For this reason TextMate comes with its own mate shell command, which supersedes the open command. For usage instructions you can run mate -h (from Terminal).

Answer 3

You can also check out the TextMate wiki: http://wiki.macromates.com/Troubleshooting/TextMateAndThePath

Answer 4

you can add to your path in osx with the following command:

echo 'export PATH=YOURPATHHERE:$PATH' >> ~/.profile, replacing "YOURPATHHERE" 

obviously replacing 'YOURPATHHERE' with the path you need. This will add it to your profile so that every time you log it is set.