What is this?

Its a testing tool for anyone trying to maintain a TextMate Grammar (ex: thing.tmLanguage.json).

How do I use this?

• First setup node/npm, and run npm install textmate-tester

  • Note: one of the dependencies node-gyp... and node-gyp is often a pain to setup. I've created a fixed/frozen environment to automate this though (see the documentation/SETUP.md)

• Well first you need to have a textmate grammar file (example: ./cpp.tmLanguage.json)

• Then you need a folder full of example files (ex: ./examples/hello_world.cpp)

• Then you can run a command like this npx textmate-tester --textmateExtension cpp --syntax cpp.tmLanguage.json --examples examples/ generate-specs --all

• Inside of the example folder, a spec file will be generated for each example (ex: examples/hello_world.spec.yaml)

• Use git to commit these spec files every time you change the grammar

• By using git-diff, you can see which examples got parsed differently

  • When you're fixing a bug you'll expect certain files to change, and can basically confirm they changed
  • However, you might also see several other spec files change, that should not have changed. And this basically shows you exactly what kind of side-effects were caused by a bug fix or feature addition.

Installation/Setup this project for

Everything is detailed in the documentation/setup.md!