Buddy Toups: A Designer’s Blog January 30, 2008

You might be migrating to TextMate from BBEdit or some other text editors. And used a featured that allowed automatic backup copies for ever file you edit and save and was looking for this feature in Textmate, honestly it doesn’t exist. I found a solution in TextMate’s Wiki that works, quiet well actually, you create a small command in the Bundle Editor:

From TextMate Wiki Main / Howtos - TextMate Wiki

The Setup: Set up a TM_BACKUP_DIR environment variable in the Advanced / Shell Variables section of the TM preferences. Set it to the directory where you’d like your backups to be saved. Use the full path (i.e., /Users/michael/Documents rather than ~/Documents).

Save: Current File

# Save a copy of this file to the backup directory
THEDATE=`php -r ‘print date(’Ymd‘);’`
THETIME=`php -r ‘print date(’His‘);’`
mkdir -p "$TM_BACKUP_DIR/$THEDATE"
perl -e ‘while (<STDIN>) { print $_; }’ > "$TM_BACKUP_DIR/$THEDATE/$TM_FILENAME.$THEDATE.$THETIME.backup"

Std In: Entire Document

Std Out: Discard

Activation: Key Equivalent Cmd-S

My variation of the script Michael Lehmkuhl posted in the Wiki. I change the directory creation to duplicate the full file path of the current file in the backups folder.

# Save a copy of this file to the backup directory
THEDATE=`php -r ‘print date(’Ymd‘);’`
THETIME=`php -r ‘print date(’His‘);’`
mkdir -p "$TM_BACKUP_DIR/<b>$TM_DIRECTORY</b>"
perl -e ‘while (<STDIN>) { print $_; }’ > "$TM_BACKUP_DIR/<b>$TM_DIRECTORY</b>/$THEDATE.$THETIME_$TM_FILENAME"