Migrating from TextMate to BBEdit

I think the closest you'll get to that in BBEdit is the "Text -> Prefix/Suffix Lines..." command. Assign a key combination to it and trigger it to bring up a sheet with options to add or remove prefixes and suffixes for all selected lines.

It's maybe not as fancy as the TextMate feature, but in some ways, I slightly prefer the BBEdit approach. It's a bit more intuitive, I think. I'm more likely to get what I wanted on the first try. ;-)

The best way I've found to simulate this behavior is to use BBEdit's clippings feature. I created a bunch of clippings to insert the opening and closing characters with the cursor positioned between them (and any other text I want). I then assigned keyboard shortcuts to them. For example, Control-Command-[ gives me a pair of square brackets with my cursor in between ready for input.

Again, maybe not as fancy as TextMate's auto-matching pairs, but I do find I get fewer accidental, unwanted closing parens and brackets with the clipping method in BBEdit.

> What about smart indentation?

I'm not exactly sure what you mean here. However, the Preferences -> Editor Defaults -> Auto-indent option might help. Preferences -> Editing: General -> Soft wrapped line indention also might be of some use.

-Dennis

> Additional you can make a rectangular selection in BBEdit (hold Alt while selecting, make sure Soft Wrap is turned off) and paste the content of the clipboard to each line at the selected position. Again, this is not as fancy as in TextMate but does the job.

Be sure to check out the Clipping feature in the manual. It is one of BBEdit's best features. You would miss a lot of functionality that makes BBEdit such a decent editor. For example the syntax for adding parenthesises to a selection is:
#selstart#(#select#)#selend#
With an assigned keyboard shortcut this is pretty nice. You can further tweak BBEdit with little applescripts that make your editing life easier. One of my favorites is "Select Word" (by John Gruber if I remember that right):

tell application "BBEdit"
tell window 1
set sel_offset to characterOffset of selection
set cur_line to startDisplayLine of selection
try
select (last word of display_line cur_line ¬
whose characterOffset ≤ sel_offset)
on error
select display_line cur_line
end try
end tell
end tell

This group is a good ressource for little bits. You'll find a lot of solution to specific problems. Searching the archives is strongly recommended.

Happy editing
Roland

I'd put up something similar a few months back using Quickeys but I wouldn't advise purchasing Quickeys until the developer situation over there is resolved. (The old developer quit and they are looking for a new one to take over the code but I haven't heard if they've had any luck)

I kind of liked Quickeys because you could have a floating pallet of macros as well as something like textexpander but execute macros as well as expand text. It made for some really cool stuff you could write. Too bad the software is in limbo.

I've heard good things about Butler, though (FWIW :-) I'm a LaunchBar and
Keyboard Maestro user myself.

Regards,

Patrick Woolsey
==
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