One thing it doesn’t have, though, is tab completion. Or rather, it didn’t, until now.

What does it do?

It’s the same thing you get in Stata’s Command window: you type part of a variable name, press tab, and the name is completed as far as it can be without ambiguity.

For example, I type —

— I press tab —

— and the variable name is completed, leaving the cursor one space to the right and ready to keep typing. (Note that my use of Stata’s tab[le] command in these examples is an unfortunate coincidence and has nothing to do with tab completion! I could just as well have written regress fr. Sorry.)

In fact, proper tab completion (as found in Unixy shells, for file names, but not in Stata’s Command window) goes a little further than this: if you press tab at the end of an ambiguous name stem, it prompts you with all the possible endings.

And so it is with this TextMate bundle addition. I type —

— I press tab —

— and the name is completed up to the next ambiguity. So I press tab again —

— and I get a tooltip list of options. I add an ‘s’ (just enough to pick one option out) —

— press tab again —

— and bingo!

How does it work?

Each time you press tab, the bundle asks Stata to run a simple .do file; this exports your current data set with an if 0 condition, meaning that all the actual data is excluded, and we just get the variable names. (For detail, check the Ruby script).

A slightly unfortunate effect of this is that your Stata Results window (and log, if you’re keeping one) fills up with these outsheet commands. I hope that’s not a deal-breaker. If only Stata would provide some basic AppleScript support (please?) I might be able to do something about this.

How do I get it?

Update! As per comments below, you can now download the bundle with tab completion rolled in, so you can probably stop reading here.

At some point I may roll this into a new bundle file to make installation easier (there are also a few fixes I’ve made to the original bundle). But in the meantime, you can add it to the bundle yourself.

Open the bundle editor (Bundles > Bundle Editor > Show Bundle Editor) and select the Stata bundle. Click the ‘+’ button and select ‘New Command’. Give the command a name. Then, on the right, select Save: Nothing, Input: Selected Text or Word and Output: Replace Selected Text. Choose Activation: Key Equivalent: and a hotkey (I use Ctrl-Tab).

Then paste in the following Ruby script:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
 
require ENV['TM_SUPPORT_PATH'] + '/lib/exit_codes.rb'
dofile = '/tmp/textmatestatavars.do'
varfile = '/tmp/textmatestatavars.tsv'
 
stem = ENV['TM_CURRENT_WORD']
stem = '' if stem.nil? || stem.match(/\s$/)
stem = stem.lstrip
 
TextMate.exit_discard if stem.match(/[^a-z0-9_]/im)
 
open(dofile, 'w') do |f| 
  f.print %{set notifyuser off\noutsheet #{stem}* using "#{varfile}" if 0, noquote\n}
end
 
File.unlink(varfile) if File.exist?(varfile)
`osascript -e 'tell application "Stata" to open POSIX file "#{dofile}"'`
 
unless File.exist?(varfile)
  print 'No variables found'	
  TextMate.exit_show_tool_tip
end
 
vars = open(varfile) { |f| f.read.chomp.split("\t") }
 
if vars.length == 1
  print vars.first + ' '
  exit
end
 
v1, v2 = vars.sort.values_at(0, -1).sort_by { |v| v.length }
common_prefix = (0...(v1.length)).each do |i|
  break v1[0, i] unless v1[i, 1] == v2[i, 1]
end
common_prefix = v1 unless common_prefix.is_a?(String)
 
if stem == common_prefix
  print vars.join("\n")
  TextMate.exit_show_tool_tip
else
  print common_prefix
end

It should look like this: