Painfully Obvious.

I have a working prototype of my MediaWiki TextMate bundle. By this I mean I can login to Wikipedia, open my own userpage, make changes to it, and save those changes, all within TextMate. I’d try doing something else, but I’m too scared it’ll break.

OK. First, the upside: I was able to do all this through Ruby, including the parts that interface with TextMate. Any other text editor would require a full‐fledged plugin and a whole lot of bulk.

Now the problem: there’s no other TextMate bundle that really does anything like this. Bundles are designed to work with existing files on the local disk. This bundle fetches text from a wiki page, saves it to disk, then launches it in TextMate. So it needs to sit somewhere in the interim.

There’s more: the bundle needs explicit configuration. It needs to know which servers to connect to. It needs a place to store the preferences. And it needs a place to keep session info, since I can’t keep the session persistent for an indefinite amount of time.

Also, my code probably looks like crap, and I have the sneaking suspicion I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. But we’ll see.