So you have a pattern you want to match across multiple lines, and you have a regular expression that matches it. You will probably be used to doing this in perl like this: /some.+?stuff/s or using regex in ruby like this: /some.+?stuff/m However you have just started to get used to Textmate as an editor and you see it supports regex matching. Why though does it not use /s or /m for multi-line dot matching?