On Jul 27, 2011, at 11:49 PM, Brett Kelly wrote:
> If somebody asked you, my new friend, why you use BBEdit, what would
> you tell them?
Let me start by stating that I'm biased. I liked the product enough to relocate
my family cross-country to work for the company. That said…
BBEdit is a mature product, and it has many features that even I don't use.
Here are a few things about BBEdit that I like that may appeal to you. There
are entire swaths of product I'm not even going to mention, so if this list
doesn't inspire you to join us, maybe someone else's will. :-)
Many useful transformations are built in (see the Text" menu). "Process Lines
Containing: is one of my favorites. You tell it how to find lines, and then you
can delete them, extract them to a new document, count them, or any combination
of those. It also sorts (optionally using regular expressions to locate the
portion to sort on), does case changes, and many other transformations. If you
need to repeatedly perform a series of transformations, you can configure a
Text Factory describing the transforms, and then apply _that_ to the text
directly.
It has a very fast, flexible search and replace engine. It can be used in
single files, or across multiple files grouped by folder, project, etc. It
optionally supports regular expressions, and file filters, to avoid searching
in files that match a particular pattern.
BBEdit supports "clippings", which are bits of text that optionally take
context, and perform substitutions and replacements. For (a bad) example,
consider a clipping containing these text and tokens:
<em>#selectionorinsertion#</em>
If you apply it to an empty selection, you get
<em>(the blinking insertion point)</em>
If you apply it to selected text, it surrounds the selection with the <em></em>
tags.
This is a trivial example, but if you look in the manual (starting on page 259
-- Wait! Did I mention that it has a manual?), you'll see other tokens which do
much more, including #script# and #system#, which are really powerful.
It's tightly coupled with the OS. You can use Automator to access BBEdit's text
transforms, or AppleScript to manipulate text or shuttle data between
documents, or control BBEdit itself.
If you spend much time in the shell, we provide command line tools to perform
edits, diffs, and searches. I have mine configured as my $EDITOR.
You can run shell scripts directly from BBEdit, and get the results in BBEdit
as well. Ruby, perl, and python also have syntax checker support.
You can write tiny shell scripts that can be applied to documents, or
selections within the document.
BBEdit can easily read and write files owned by the system.
It has support for Subversion and Perforce built in.
It has a lightweight FTP and SFTP client built in, and integrates well with
Interarchy and Transmit if you need better control over your transfers.
There's an awesome community of users here who are very willing to share
solutions, or brainstorm problems with you.
And there's a 30 day demo available.
Hope this helps,
Steve
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the
"BBEdit Talk" discussion group on Google Groups.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected]
For more options, visit this group at
<http://groups.google.com/group/bbedit?hl=en>
If you have a feature request or would like to report a problem,
please email "[email protected]" rather than posting to the group.
Follow @bbedit on Twitter: <http://www.twitter.com/bbedit>
