At 11:42 -0500 6/22/06, Craig Heilman wrote: >Now I know that BBEdit isn't billed as a project management solution but since >I spend most my computer time in it anyway... I've been thinking about how to >use BBEdit for managing my projects and thought some on the list may have some >ideas. I currently use a combination of tools but if there's a way to >consolidate down to using BBEdit and one or two other tools...
I use BBEdit worksheets pretty much as a replacement for Finder. A /projects/ directory has a bunch of subfolders each of which contains a BBEdit workbook. My main workbook is open at all times and contains bbedit (the tool) or open -a ### commands that can be selected and executed to start up applications or, more often, pass a data file to an application. I use a standard first line for each project to allow the mark menu to be an aid for moving around. The secondary workbooks are set up so they open up some always used files, change working directories, and establish environment variables during the startup process. They often set up Terminal.app windows for using things like telnet or curl which are not happy with BBEdit's treatment of return, as opposed to line feed, characters sent to stderr. Maintaining a list of open commands frees me from searching around in Finder and identifies files in use with comments that I can add at will. I often paste directly from email messages or web pages into the worksheets. There are some problems that I would like to see fixed: 1) BBEdit's mark menu cannot be alphabetized. If you have a dozen project sections in your worksheet they can be hard to locate. 2) I can't use variable width tab fields to contain snippets of tab-separated data that keep popping up in my world. 3) BBEdit worksheets are no longer TEXT files (they are plists without the extension) so I can't use them as data for another application and I can't add to one with a shell command. I can no longer maintain a perl script as a workbook and expect to execute it without first opening it in BBEdit. 4) A BBEdit worksheet opened by another BBEddit worksheet is not given the UNIX environment set up by the first worksheet. #! filters behave the same way and are not executed by the shell process associated with the worksheet from which they are executed. Most of the things I do have been moved into BBEdit from MPW (Classic only) and sometimes I wish I could go back. But some of Bare Bones' changes are nice. I can wrap long lines while displaying in BBEdit, for instance. But I can't write into another already opened BBEdit window the way I once did. -- A billion seconds ago Harry Truman was president. A billion minutes ago was just after the time of Christ. A billion hours ago man had not yet been intelligently designed. A billion dollars ago was late yesterday afternoon in Washington. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Have a feature request? Not sure the software's working correctly? If so, please send mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, not to the list. List FAQ: <http://www.barebones.com/support/lists/bbedit_talk.shtml> List archives: <http://www.listsearch.com/BBEditTalk.lasso> To unsubscribe, send mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
