Using Dropbox to sync TextMate

Zach Waugh Zach Waugh •

I use TextMate at both home and work for doing all my development and for dealing with pretty much anything text related. I got tired of having inconsistent environments between work and home. I wanted to be able to create a new snippet at work and be able to use it at home (and vice versa) without having to recreate it. Turns out you can do this easily with Dropbox.

Dropbox1 is a service to sync files across multiple computers and to the cloud, and It's free to use with 2GB of storage. It makes it dead simple to keep files in sync and you can access those files from the web as well. All you have to do is store your TextMate specific files in your Dropbox account, and then point TextMate to use those files.

  1. Quit TextMate if you have it running

  2. Move the ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate folder to your Dropbox

  3. Open up Terminal and create a symbolic link from your ~/Dropbox/TextMate folder to your ~/Library/Application Support folder:

  4. $ ln -s ~/Dropbox/TextMate ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate

  5. Repeat steps 1-4 on all the computers you want to sync.

Now any changes you make to your TextMate bundles on any computer will be synced across all your machines. For this to work transparently, you'll want to make sure Dropbox is running at login.

1If you don't have a Dropbox account, sign up using this link and we both get extra storage space for free.