Extending BBEdit

For those who don't know, BBEdit is the premier text editor on the Mac. With great HTML markup features, Perl integration, excellent AppleScript support and many more great features it's the uber tool for programmers or anyone else dealing with text or code. Here are a few of my favorite additions to BBEdit.

Plug-ins

My first and only entry into the world of writing plug-ins for BBEdit came and went in the couple hours it took to write Josh's ASCII Table plug-in. All the plug-in does is create a new window and write out an ASCII table. I was always misplacing mine so figured I would use this plug-in a lot, but now that BBEdit has a built in ASCII character list/window all my plug-in does is collect dust :(

For other plug-ins check out the list at Bare Bones.

Glossaries

Glossaries are a sort of snippet collection. They collect any piece of text you want (contained in text files) and provide it in a floating utility window for adding to your document. You can create glossaries for any type of file you work on (C files -- .c; HTML files -- .html, .htm; etc.) or put items in the Universal Items glossary that you might use for more than one language.

Some of the items I've placed in my Universal Items glossary have to do with "container" characters. Putting something in parentheses or quotes always required more gestures than you would think the modern world has time for. Here are the one line glossary items I use to shorten that time:

Put in parens --> (#SELECT#)
Put in quotes --> "#SELECT#"
Put in brackets --> [#SELECT#]

Simply create a text file called "Put in parens" and make the contents "(#SELECT#)" (minus the quotes) and when you select a piece of text and choose the item in the glossary the text will have parens around it. Add hot keys and it's almost fun cleaning up someone's code :)

One of the crazier things I've done is create a Perl script which will convert C header files into glossaries. After noticing how cool the glossary is and how much fun digging around in header files isn't, I started a little script to turn the glossary into a header reference tool. Check out Headers2Glossary for more info.