Steve Kalkwarf wrote:
Leaping to the conclusion that "file groups are totally unreliable"
is a pretty big stretch: The bug only affects searching.
Which for me, is fairly close to 100% of the reason I ever use BBEdit
File Groups.
For the bulk of my work, I can't rely on a File Group containing a
complete unchanging set of files to work on. This isn't an issue with
File Groups per se, but our working environment. Thus, my major use
for File Groups is tactical: created specifically for a search
(usually search and replace) and discarded after use.
Imho, the best File Groups implementation was in the old Homesite 3,
back when it was still made by Allaire. This implementation was
changed in Homesite 4 (or 4.5), for the worse in my opinion. They
called this 'Projects'.
In Homesite 3, you could create a Project from an existing directory,
add files individually, and add all open files. When you removed a
file from a Project, the file was actually fully removed from that
Project: it remained on disk, but searches against the Project did
not include the file. Best of all, Projects were plain text files, so
I could create them outside of Homesite, which I did often.
Thus my initial horror when discovering that when removing a file
from a BBEdit File Group (pre 8.7), did not remove the file when
doing searches or search/replace operations against the File Group.
Thus it seemed to me an improvement when 8.7 didn't allow removing
files from a File Group if that file was imported as part of a folder.
To get around my issues with File Groups, I changed my workflow to
use the terminal to issue unix find commands, filtering output thru
grep till I got the file set I wanted, then piping the result to
xargs bbedit (often opening a couple hundred files), then using
searches against the set of open files.
What I would love to be able to do is take a list of filenames and
create a File Group containing only those items. Or add all open
files. Or add all files from a Search Results browser. I frequently
copy and paste the results from a Search Results browser and do a
search/replace to remove everything but the filenames, which I can
then use for further processing, in BBEdit or elsewhere.
So to sum up: BBEdit's File Groups implementation is mostly useless
to me given my workflow. I don't understand why what seems to me the
simple operations in the previous paragraph aren't part of File Group
functionality. A text format for file groups would seem to solve all
my issues (the xml format for Text Factories is great: I've created
lengthy Text Factories via scripting).
Thus my main, quite possibly only, use for File Groups the way they
are currently implemented, is a quick way to search a set of
subfolders when searching the parent folder would return results I
don't need.
I stand by my original statement: to me at least, the search bug
makes File Groups totally unreliable.
Thanks,
-Mike
Michael Wiik
Messagenet Communications Research
Washington, DC Area Web Development
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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