Sublime Text 2 Python plugin to "type" the file that's currently being edited, character by character, for screencasts.

TypeFileOut.py

import sublime, sublime_plugin

BLOCKLEN = 4

class TypeFileOutCommand(sublime_plugin.TextCommand):
    def nextchar(self):
        if self.body:
            totype = []
            while 1:
                try:
                    ch = self.body.pop(0)
                except IndexError:
                    totype.append(ch)
                    break
                totype.append(ch)
                if ch in ["\n", " "] or len(totype) > BLOCKLEN:
                    break
            self.view.insert(self.edit, self.view.sel()[0].begin(), "".join(totype))
            timeout = 10
            if "\n" in totype:
                timeout = 250
            elif " " in totype:
                timeout = 80
            sublime.set_timeout(self.nextchar, timeout)

    def run(self, edit):
        self.edit = edit
        # First, read everything in this view
        reverything = sublime.Region(0, self.view.size())
        self.body = list(self.view.substr(reverything))

        self.view.erase(edit, reverything)

        sublime.set_timeout(self.nextchar, 2000)

Excellent idea!

...but I get the following error in ST3:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Users/dutton/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 3/Packages/User/TypeFileOut.py", line 18, in nextchar
self.view.insert(self.edit, self.view.sel()[0].begin(), "".join(totype))
File "/Applications/Sublime Text.app/Contents/MacOS/sublime.py", line 645, in insert
raise ValueError("Edit objects may not be used after the TextCommand's run method has returned")
ValueError: Edit objects may not be used after the TextCommand's run method has returned
Writing file /Users/dutton/Desktop/foo with encoding UTF-8 (atomic)

You can replace self.view.insert(...) command with

self.view.run_command("insert", {"characters": "".join(totype)})

The problem is all running indents get multiplicated. I have only started evaluating SublimeText so cannot fix that at the moment.

Thanks (one year later!)

I managed to fix the indent problem by adding "auto_indent": false in my preferences file.