How to add Ant and NAnt support to TextMate

Apr 8, 2008 •

The moment my 30 day evaluation of TextMate expired, I ordered a copy. The last time I got so enthused about an application that I stumped up the cash for it was about 3 years ago, with Delicious Library. Today I used it to edit some NAnt files. Here's how.

My ancient little Mac Mini already had Subversion. I installed Mono so I could get a working copy of NAnt. You'll need both.

You need to run this in a Terminal window to enable syntax highlighting for both tools:

export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
mkdir -p /Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles
cd /Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles
svn co http://macromates.com/svn/Bundles/trunk/Review/Bundles/C%23.tmbundle
svn co http://macromates.com/svn/Bundles/trunk/Review/Bundles/Ant.tmbundle/
osascript -e 'tell app "TextMate" to reload bundles'

The TextMate bundles repository has some non-ASCII encodings, so the first line just ensures that you have a UTF-8 encoding selected. The middle 4 lines make a directory, and put the Ant and NAnt bundles in that directory. The last line reloads the bundles for you if TextMate is already running. What a pleasant way to do .NET.