Glenn Fleishman - Take Control of BBEdit

Although BBEdit first appeared in 1991, I was late to discover its pleasures. While I wrote a fair amount of code in the 1990s, the mix of machines and jobs I had led me to use the screen-based editor vi (and its better vim variant). Thats what I cut my teeth on, and I just kept blindly using it. BBEdit was a programmers tool, and I only programmed a little. I was mostly a writer, although I regularly created and updated Web sites.

What finally overcame my reluctance to use BBEdit was Bare Boness gateway drug, the free TextWrangler, the successor to the more-limited BBEdit Lite. At a time when BBEdits retail price was around $125, TextWrangler was free, and it did much of what BBEdit offered. I was hooked. Most notably, TextWrangler provided so-called global regular-expression pattern matching, known as grep , using the same elements found in Perl and other programming languages. (I also started spending an increasingly large amount of time programming.)

Ive found from talking to many colleaguesand even my own father, who designs small Web sitesthat most of the repetitive, irritating, and manual tasks I performed in years past are common. But convincing people to try a program that has an intimidating number of features and a reputation as being for technical people is what led me to write this book. That reputation is undeserved: BBEdit is for everyone, and you can learn to use just the parts you need without becoming overwhelmed by those you dont.

I didnt just learn to manipulate text in TextWrangler, I also learned to use it to write. Both TextWrangler and BBEdit let you write without distractions. They display only plain text with, at most, some syntax coloring coloring that differentiates coding (in programming) or formatting (in markup languages) from plain text or variable contents.

After using TextWrangler regularly for a bit, I moved up to BBEdit, because TextWrangler lacks several features: version control for storing, retrieving, and comparing multiple time-stamped states of the same file; text factories, little macros for carrying out sequences of actions; and other tools related to Web site management.

Even still, I continued to use vim for many basic editing tasksuntil the Project feature appeared in BBEdit 9. In BBEdit, a project is a container that lets you reference (not copy or move) all the different text files, aliases, URLs, and folders associated with a particular, well, project , into a single bundle, regardless of where the actual files live. Projects have saved me innumerable hours, and Ive become a BBEdit addict, to the point where I write nearly everything in BBEdit.

I want you to do the same. Any time you encounter a task that would result in wasted time and effort, or that involves text or collections of text files, whether theyre formatted as HTML or XML or CSS or plain old text, you can turn to BBEdit for a simpler and more satisfying resolution.

In this book, I look at three major tasks that BBEdit does exceedingly well, but that require mastering different parts of the program: working with text, managing Web sites, and using projects. The more Ive learned in each of these areas, the more efficient Ive become. Some weeks, I reclaim hours of otherwise wasted time. Plus, the results of my work are better! This book is a combination of a tutorial for features that, once mastered, you will use constantly, and a conceptual introduction to ways of working using BBEdit that will improve your efficiency and increase your professional satisfaction.

My goal is to take you from standing on the threshold of the BBEdit doorway to boogying down with the features within. Party on, reader!

BBEdit includes a technical manual thats exhaustive in what it covers, reviewing each feature set and option. You can Choose Help > User Manual to download the latest copy in PDF format, if its not already on your Mac. (The manual was part of the default installation before 10.1.1.). BBEdit also has online help documents that explain terms like grep. You can bring up the built-in help files by choosing Help > BBEdit Help.

Full Disclosure: The only text of any length Ive written lately that wasnt in BBEdit is this book! It was outlined and roughed out in BBEdit, but I did the real work in Pages, because its possible to place images and style text in Pages, and because Pages provides live change tracking and support for exporting to PDF and EPUB.