I have been using BBEdit for years and this is my favorite Mac text editor. I spent more time than I'd like to admit on my current setup. This is my opininiated configuration, don't expect too much – you'll need to pick and choose items.

Since 1994, Barebones software led by Rich Siegel are releasing regular updates and it doesn’t suck®.

Why would I want to store my configuration on GitHub?

We're standing on the shoulders of giants and I learned by forking git repository and breaking stuff. Unfortunately, there is not many configurations examples available on the net. Thus I'm providing my current setup in a public repository.

I ❤️ BBEdit and I hope that will like it too. It's wicked fast and a remarkable piece of software for working with very large files. If you like/use this setup, please consider giving it a star!

Installation

1. Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/bhdicaire/bbeditSetup ~
2. Copy selected components to ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/ a. If you are using BBEdit 12.6 or later, choose “Language Modules” from the Folders menu on BBEdit’s application menu to open the appropriate folder.
3. Restart BBEdit and you can thank me later

Command-line tools

Several command-line tool are available as an interface with the application:

• bbedit open FTP and SFTP URLs from the command line

• bbdiff : “Find Differences” diff helper for SCM systems such as Subversion or Git. bbfind to run multi-file searches The bbresults tool parses file/line output from other Unix commands in order to generate browseable GUI results windows so that you can easily navigate warnings and errors (for example, from compiler output).

• The bbedit command-line tool lets you open FTP and SFTP URLs from the command line, and behaves consistently with other Unix tools by allowing you to create files on the fly, as well as by accepting input piped from other Unix commands. (Try “ls -la | bbedit”, for example.)

• bbdiff provides a command-line interface to “Find Differences”; it’s very useful when used as a command-line diff helper for SCM systems such as Subversion or Git.

• Use bbfind to run multi-file searches from the command line, and return the results for additional processing.

About the BBEdit support folder

This folder contains files and folders which define or extend BBEdit’s capabilities. Below is a quick summary of each item's purpose. For detailed information about its contents, please refer to Chapter 2 of the BBEdit User Manual.

(This document is written in Markdown. It's readable as plain text, but prettier if you choose "Preview in BBEdit" from the "Markup" menu.)

• Attachment Scripts

  Contains AppleScript scripts which are run at specific points in BBEdit's execution: when the application starts, is quit or slept (with the "Sleep BBEdit" command); and when documents are open, saved, and closed.

• Clippings

  Items in this folder appear on BBEdit's "Clippings" menu. Use folders to organize the clippings into "Sets"; if a set's folder is named with a file name suffix that maps to a particular language, the set is automatically made active when a document in that language is active. You can find lots of useful clippings sets in the BBEdit clippings library.

• Color Schemes

  Contains color schemes, which can be created and applied in the "Text Colors" preference pane.

• Completion Data

  This folder contains tags files in the format generated by bbedit --maketags (the exuberant ctags format). Each folder in here corresponds to a named language; any tags files are used to generate text completions when editing files in that language.

• Custom Keywords

  This folder contains custom keyword files, so that you can add keywords to installed languages without fiddling your fingers in the application package or other off-limits places.

  • In this folder, place one or more files containing the keywords that you wish to be colored.

  • Each file's name should map it to the appropriate language, e.g. ".js" for JavaScript files. You can have multiple keyword files mapped to the same language, if you wish.

  • Each file should be UTF-8 text, no BOM, and contain one keyword per line.

  • Keyword lookups are case-sensitive if the language is case sensitive; case-insensitive otherwise.

  • Words in these files are colored using the "Language Keywords" color.

• HTML Templates

  Templates used for the "New HTML Document" command live in this folder; they will appear in the "Template:" pop-up menu in the New HTML Document dialog.

• Language Modules

  If you wish to add support for syntax coloring and function navigation for additional languages, place a language module here. Language modules may be compiled or “codeless” (see appendix D of the BBEdit user manual).

  Note: Do not open the BBEdit application package to extract or modify the language modules in there. That way lies madness.

• Menu Scripts

  This folder contains AppleScript scripts which attach to specific menu commands. The easiest way to manage these is by using the controls in the "Menus" preferences.

• Packages

  Place packages here to make them available to the application. For more information, see the "Packages" section in Chapter 15 of the user manual.

• Preview CSS and Preview Templates

  These folders contain templates and CSS for use with "Preview in BBEdit". Here's how it works:

  • Place a fully structured HTML document in this folder. It can contain anything you like, but should define the basic structure and appearance of the document. In the template, place a single placeholder: #DOCUMENT_CONTENT#.

  • Make a new document. Type some content into it. Use a few HTML tags, whatever, but it shouldn't have a full HTML document structure.

  • Choose "Preview in BBEdit". Note in the preview window, there is a row of items below the toolbar, containing two items: "Template:" and "CSS:". From the Template menu, you can choose the template that you saved in the first step. The contents of the document that you're previewing replace the #DOCUMENT_CONTENT# placeholder, so that when you preview, you'll actually get all of the chrome that's defined in the template, without having to replicate it for a fragmentary document that you might be working on.

  • If you place a valid CSS document in Preview CSS, it will be available on the "CSS:" menu in the preview window. Choosing it will apply that CSS to the preview as well.

• Preview Filters

  Preview filters may be used to preprocess the contents of documents that you're previewing using "Preview in BBEdit".

  Note: BBEdit supports built-in configuration for customizing Markdown rendering and preprocessing. Although you can use a preview filter to implement alternative Markdown rendering, it's better to use the built-in facilities (available in the Languages preferences, via custom settings for Markdown).

  Preview filters may themselves be one of three things:

  • An AppleScript, with a FilterTextForBBEditPreview entry point. This entry point will receive a unicode text object which is the document's contents. If there is no FilterTextForBBEditPreview entry point, the script's run handler will be called with the text. The script should return a unicode text result.

  • A Unix executable;

  • A Unix script, beginning with an appropriate #! line.

  Both Unix scripts and Unix executables will receive the document's contents as UTF-8 text on STDIN; they should write UTF-8 text to STDOUT, and the output will be previewed.

  If you wish to assign a keyboard equivalent for opening the Preview Filters menu, you can do so in the Menus & Shortcuts preferences (look under "Preview Windows").

  Live preview windows will remember your Preview Filter selection per-document. In addition, the preview filter will default to one named "DefaultFilter_<languagename>" in this folder. Unlike default preview templates and CSS, the filename extension of the preview filter is not significant; so the following (hypothetical) examples will all work:

  • DefaultFilter_Markdown.pl (a Perl script)
  • DefaultFilter_Markdown.scpt (an AppleScript)
  • DefaultFilter_Markdown (a compiled executable)

  The default preview filter can also be a symlink or alias to a filter elsewhere.

• Scratchpad

  This file contains the contents of the Scratchpad. Removing this file will cause the contents of your Scratchpad to be lost.

• Scripts

  Items in this folder appear on the Scripts menu and the Scripts palette. This includes any file type that can reasonably be applied to automation: Unix #! scripts, AppleScript script files and applets, Automator workflows, and BBEdit text factories. (Note that previously, #! scripts were in the "Unix Scripts" folder, and text factories in the "Text Factories" folder; beginning with BBEdit 10, those folders are no longer used.)

• Setup

  This folder contains configuration data for items managed in the Setup window: Grep patterns, file filters, FTP/SFTP bookmarks, and saved search sets for the Multi-File Search window.

  This folder also contains keyboard shortcut settings for menu items (as well as scripts, clippings, and other things for which you can assign keyboard shortcuts).

• Startup Items

  Items in this folder are opened when BBEdit starts up; if any items are scripts, they will be run; and if they are applications, BBEdit will launch them.

• Stationery

  Files in this folder appear on the "New with Stationery" submenu of the file menu.

• Text Filters

  This folder contains items that process the selection range in the front text document (or all of the document, if there is no selection). These may be AppleScript scripts, Automator workflows, #! filters (which before BBEdit 10 were kept in the "Unix Filters" folder), and text factories. Choose an item from the "Text Filters" palette, or use the "Apply Text Filter" command on the Text menu to apply any of these items to the front document's selection.

References

I did not collected the sources when I created my repository in 2017. By the way, finding a repository creation date is not obvious, GitHub does not display the information anywhere on the website. The REST API provides the information without authentication.

This is my current sources for BBEdit's information:

• Current Manual and Release Notes

• Google Groups: BBEdit Talk

• Stack Exchange: Super Users and Stack Overflow

• Twitter: @BBEdit

• Language Modules

  • Bare Bones Software
  • BBEdit Extras
  • GitHub: #bbedit topic
  • To create your own codeless language module, you will need the BBEdit SDK and the documentation

• EditorConfig

  • BBEdit supports the .editorconfig preferences files except line property and max_line_length
  • BBEdit also support additional keys 😄

How do I select a column of text within BBEdit? Hold down the Option key (the mouse cursor will change to a cross shape) and then drag to make a rectangular selection.

Licence

BBEditSetup is Copyright 2022 Benoît H. Dicaire and licensed under the MIT licence.