Syntax recognition for biblatex citation commands in TextMate

The LaTeX bundle that comes with TextMate will identify, and therefore colour, the syntax of citations commands passed to BibTeX, as long as they comply with the standard or natbib conventions; hence cite, citep, citet, footcite and other commands get appropriately coloured, as show below using the Cobalt syntax theme: If you are using biblatex, you might want to get the autocite and textcite commands coloured too. The following edits should lead you there:

1. Go to your Bundle Editor through the following menu selection: Bundles → Bundle Editor → Edit Languages.
2. Start by duplicating your LaTeX Language item, and rename the copied version to something different than LaTeX copy, indicating that this copy reflects the original LaTeX bundle. That will be your backup copy if something goes wrong with the rest of the editing.
3. To make sure your backup copy does not interfere with the new one, edit its scopeName variable from text.tex.latex to NULL.

The final results of Steps 1–3 should look like this: Using TextEdit, copy the content of the LateX Language item into a plain text document window, then search for meta.citation.latex. The code should start by reading: name = 'meta.citation.latex'; begin = '(?x) ( (\\) # Marker (?:foot)?(?:full)?(?:no)?(?:short)? # Function Name [cC]ite (?:al)?(?:t|p|author|year(?:par)?|title)?[ANP]* ... Append the Function Name line by adding (?:text)?(?:auto)? at the beginning of the list: name = 'meta.citation.latex'; begin = '(?x) ( (\\) # Marker (?:text)?(?:auto)?(?:foot)?(?:full)?(?:no)?(?:short)? # Function Name [cC]ite (?:al)?(?:t|p|author|year(?:par)?|title)?[ANP]* ... Copy-paste the text back into the Bundle Editor. Click the Test to see the front window document in TextMate show the new colouring for the LaTeX bundle. Happy biblatex editing!