Proportional Programming Fonts

Way back in the day, when I first really got into real Mac programming I used an old IDE called Think Pascal. One of the cool things about it was that unlike Think C, it allowed programming with proportional fonts. I typically used Geneva to code in Pascal and Monoco to program in C. I [...]

Text Mate

As most readers probably heard TextMate 2 got open sourced today. I’d abandoned it last year in preference to BBEdit 10. I’d used BBEdit way back in the mid-90′s before finally abandoning the Mac for Windows for a variety of reasons. (Primarily that I had a job for a couple of years doing IT for [...]

Ctags, Cocoa and BBEdit

If you open up Obj-C files in BBEdit you don’t get a terribly robust view. Just a few keywords are colored. If you’re used to Xcode you’re probably used to most of the standard Cocoa classes being keyword colored. There’s an easy way to do this fortunately. First create the folder:  ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Completion Data/Objective-C  BBEdit [...]

Using BBEdit With Xcode More Easily

If you are like me you quickly have come up against the limits of Xcode’s editor. It has a lot of great features including code completion. (Although I wish it’d apply a Bayesian algorithm to better guess auto-completions) What it doesn’t have is scriptability. Yes it has an Applescript dictionary but at least as of [...]

BBEdit Hints and Resources

Macdrifter had up a nice list of tips and hints for BBEdit today. Back when I was deciding whether to switch to BBedit from TextMate it was the lack of online resources that was my biggest complaint. It turned out to be less of an issue than I had thought. The last couple of months [...]

Problems with BBEdit

I’ve not talked about BBEdit for a while. Macdrifter had up a nice discussion of its pluses and minuses yesterday. A lot of what he discussed as the pluses I’ve talked about in the past — although some of the tools he uses are slightly different. He did mention something in his discussion of the [...]

Some Thoughts on TextMate 2

A lot of people are talking about the alpha for TextMate 2 that came out this week. First off I’ve pretty well switched entirely to BBEdit. I admit I still fire up TM occasionally. Less and less though. My last two big gripes of BBEdit were quick access to files in a project and a [...]

Text Mate 2 By Christmas

Text Mate 2 alpha before Christmas. Everyone else is reporting it so I will too. However I’m pretty well taken with BBEdit now. I’ve found that even a lot of the things I thought it couldn’t do it now can. They’ve been really aggressive adding new features (and fixing bugs) based upon customer reports. I’ve [...]

Latest BBEdit Fixes Unicode Bug

I’ve noticed that a few people on Twitter have encountered a bug pretty similar to one I encountered last week in BBEdit. So consider this a bit of a public service announcement. Basically if you have a print statement in your code that attempts to print certain kinds of Unicode BBEdit flags it as an [...]

BBEdit and Debugging Python

So a few years back I wrote up a guide for debugging Python using Text Mate. (Somehow the formatting got screwed up when I transferred the blog – my apologies) The process is actually pretty much the same. First install the software that communicates between pdb (the Python debugger) and BBEdit.

BBEdit and ctags

Even though I’ve decided to switch to BBEdit I’m still working out scripts and workflow. One thing I’ve been experimenting with is BBEdit’s ctag support. For a good explanation of why you might want to do this see this old post of Marc Liyanage. The problem is that with BBEdit 10 a lot of this [...]

BBEdit vs. Text Mate: The Conclusion

The quick conclusion? I’ve gone totally BBEdit although I’m keeping TextMate around. (I’ll explain why below) It’s kind of funny as at several times during the first few weeks of my going BBEdit cold turkey I nearly switched back. I became pretty frustrated several times. There still are many things I love about TextMate and [...]

Open Line in Safari from BBEdit

This is a slight modification of this morning’s script. There I was concerned about turning BBEdit into a kind of interactive calculator. This time I just want to open either the current line or selection’s url in Safari. If you are like me in your comments you often put links to deeper discussion or commentary [...]

Evaluate Selection in BBEdit

Something the great Applescript support in BBEdit opens up is a nice calculator. I just wrote this in Python using its eval() function so that it would evaluate either the line your cursor is on or the selection and then paste the results. Now I run this via Quickeys as you can’t run a Unix [...]

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