bbedit

ccstone has a nice cheat sheet over on Github. It’s a quick reference for BBEdit Regex. By way of Mac OS X Hints

The BBEdit grep based find and replace is a powerful tool. It really shows its strength when working on an entire folder of text files. Create a new BBEdit Disk browser: Open the multi-file search panel: Enter the search and replace terms and BBEdit will search every file and return a hit list. Alternatively, the substitution can be performed automatically.

FTP Access While this post was inspired by my move to a static blog system, I regularly need to interact with text files on remote servers over FTP.1 I have used Notepad++ on Windows for years and I’ve never been thrilled with the FTP plugin. Dropbox is an amazing technology, but an FTP client is still a critical tool that I suspect will be needed for many more decades. A good FTP based text editor is essential.

BBEdit has some nice tricks when it comes to working with multiple files. To get a quick text listing of the contents of a folder, just drag the folder onto a BBEdit document. The list of files and subdirectories will be appended to the document.

More than just a cheat sheet, Oliver Taylor offers a bunch of AppleScripts for mastering cursor control in BBEdit.1 By way of Clark (again) BBEdit and Sublime Text links are at their highest value this weekend. ↩︎

I’m not very good with regular expressions, but I do know Grep is powerful magic. As part of my exciting weekend I needed to go through a 36K line XML file and change all of the URL’s from this format: http://www.macdrifter.com/2011/09/when-is-an-ipad-enough-for-notes/ To this format where the ending forward slash is replaced by “.html” http://www.macdrifter.com/2011/09/when-is-an-ipad-enough-for-notes.html BBEdit to the rescue. Not only was BBEdit the only text editor that could open the 254MB file but the Find and Replace tools support regex.

1. There's a better way to add comments in Markdown, than using all caps. It shows up when I'm working, but will not make it into the final document.1 2. The Sort Lines function responds to Grep formatting. That means I can use the sort function to organize end links without impacting other lines (this is a work in progress) 3. I've only scratched the surface of BBEdit. Glenn's book is $5 and totally worth it.

I really like Kaushik's use of a timer in the macro to provide different functionality based on the rate of entry. I might riff on some of these tricks for new macros. Although I do think BBEdit already has some nice features to accomplish complex text wrapping, I have Keyboard Maestro macros for application that are not as feature rich as BBEdit. By way of Clark's Tech Blog.

A slowly growing list of advanced tips and tricks for BBEdit. For example, a trick for making tables look much cleaner. Ryan Wilcox also has a good collection of BBEdit material on GitHub.

My BBEdit settings on GitHub. I have added several scripts and bbcolor files. I use these as language specific colors. I mostly use the "Macdrifter" style for markdown and the "Solarized Light" for Python.