Yesterday I was writing this code over and over and over:

%li

  = f.label :first_name, "What is your first name, good sir"

  = f.text_area :first_name

The process I needed to do was:

1. Add a field to the database
2. Write those three lines of code that referenced the field I created.

I had about 40 fields to create. Half way through my task I realized I could use a Jig.

A jig in woodworking is a custom tool created to control the location of another tool.

In our case it’s a temporary tool created by us, used by our text editor to automate a task. But I write this jig with the intention that I’ll throw it away and never use it again.

After I came to terms with creating something, using it 20 times then throwing it away, I wrote the following BBEdit clipping.

%li

  = f.label :#CLIPBOARD#, "<##>"

  = f.text_area :#CLIPBOARD#

My process for using this jig was:

1. Create the field in the database, and copy the new field name to the clipboard.
2. Run the jig. My database field name is now populated
3. Start typing the desired custom label

My initial problem creating this jig was that I needed the same value two places. Clippings don’t let you mirror one value to another place, so I thought I was stuck, until I realized that I could use the clipboard here.

Sometimes automation happens at a strategic level: “I know I do this a lot, and I know I’m going to do this a lot in the future, so let me let my editor help me”. Sometimes automation happens at a tactical level: “I need to do this 40 times, but then I’ll never do this again”. Both are equally valid!

I put this clipping in its own folder (“Jigs”) and gave it a keyboard shortcut (F10). The next time I need to create a jig I’m going to put it in that same folder and reuse the keyboard shortcut.

For a long time I’ve wanted to zoom in my documents, either to see them when really far away or to use them with a projector or Airplay.

Today I found how to do it with BBEdit, thanks to a feature in BBEdit hidden in the Applescript support.

tell application "BBEdit"
    set display magnification of window 1 to 2.0 -- displays text at 2x
end tell

Woh, suddenly my text is bigger!

(set it back to normal by set display magnification of window 1 to 1.0)

“Yeah, but why don’t you just make the font size bigger?”

I investigated the differences between just increasing the font and using the display magnification. They look pretty much identical to me. So, yes, you could increase the font size.

The problem I always have with font size is remembering what size it was originally. Was it 10? 12? 14? (Yes, this is a silly excuse)

With the display magnification property I know the “normal” size is 1.0.

However, yes, it’s mostly a curiosity, which is probably why it’s hidden in the Applescript dictionary and not in the interface somehow.

However, we can change that

Let’s create three Applescripts: Zoom in, Zoom Out, and Zoom to Normal.

Zoom in.applescript

tell application "BBEdit"
    tell window 1
        set display magnification to display magnification * 1.25 
    end tell
end tell

Zoom Out.applescript

tell application "BBEdit"
    tell window 1
        set display magnification to display magnification / 1.25 
    end tell
end tell

Zoom To Normal.applescript

tell application "BBEdit"
    set display magnification of window 1 to 1.0 -- displays text at 2x
end tell

If we add these to the Scripts folder (normally in `~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Scripts/) they show up in BBEdit’s Scripts menu.

Today I needed to do a find with Applescript then select everything except the first and last character of that selection.

Even if you’re not doing this exact thing, it’s sometimes not obvious in Applescript and BBEdit how to do this task. (It took me about an hour of head scratching to get this script like it is).

To some extent I’ve already covered this topic BBEdit Hints: Selecting a Sentence, but the length of that script obscures the point a bit. This is a simple script that in 6 lines of code does a simple job.

In addition to creating BBEdit text filters with Unix shell tools, you can also create them with Applescript. The User manual for BBEdit talks about this, but lacks an example.

So here’s an example, which uses Applescript to replace every space it finds with a carriage return.

Today I wanted to send my selection to the Unix Worksheet, so I wrote a script.

The long and short of it was that I typed a Unix command in a BBEdit text window. I wanted to run this command, but I’m too lazy to copy/paste it to a Worksheet. So I wrote the following script.

tell application "BBEdit"

    set output to selection as text

    set uws to Unix worksheet window
    tell uws
        select insertion point after last character
        set selection to output
    end tell
end tell

And there you have it - send a Unix command to the Worksheet, all selected and ready to run!

I love using ctags in my BBEdit projects so I can quickly jump to the definition of a function. I’ve been manually doing this (using a feature of the Ryan’s Rails package… but today I decided I needed some automation in my life.

Enter guard a Ruby tool that watches a directory for specified files to change, and when they do guard runs a specified command.

There’s a great screencast about Guard that covers many things about it, but if you just want your ctags to be updated automatically here’s what you do.

$ sudo gem install guard
$ sudo gem install fs-notify
$ sudo gem install guard-shell  

For those of you in the Ruby community that Know Better… feel free to omit the sudo, or put the gems in your Gemfile, or RVM global gemset, or whatever. These instructions assume the reader has no experience with Ruby, and no patience to fight with modern professional gem/ruby management techniques.

Create a .Guardfile_rails, with the following contents. Create this in your home directory.

guard :shell do
  watch(%r{^(?:app|lib)/.+\.rb$}) { `/usr/local/bin/bbedit --maketags` }
end

The first parameter to the watch function is a regex matching what files to watch. Since this is a Rails project watching .rb files in app/ or lib/ is fine, as that’s where most of the code lives anyway. You may need to modify this for your particular project requirement.

Guard is supposed to automatically look for and load a .Guardfile in your home directory, if one doesn’t already exist your current project folder. This didn’t work for me. I also write things beyond Ruby some times, so I may want to create a .Guardfile_python.

On the command line, in your project, folder

$ guard --guardfile ~/.Guardfile_rails

Guard will just sit there with a prompt and that’s OK. Save a file in your project and switch back to Guard: it ran the bbedit --maketags script.

That’s all there is to it!

While BBEdit has a great Open File by Name feature, something I like to do is use the BBEdit Worksheet to open files.

Here’s how:

1. Open the BBEdit worksheet. I like to use projects, so I use the project specific BBEdit Worksheet
2. cd into the project directory
3. Use the bbedit command to open the documents you require.

For example, in Rails if I want to open HTML source for a web page (called views in Rails nomenclature)

bbedit app/views/widgets/new.*

This will open up all the files that begin with new, which might be useful. Rails, for example, has separate files for each format the app outputs data - using the Worksheet in this manner will open them all.

rwilcox:

BBEdit has this useful feature: it will strip whitespace added to end of lines OR it will remove all the whitespace from lines that are *just* whitespace.

This setting is at BBEdit -> Preferences -> Text Files -> Strip trailing whitespace.

Most of the time I have this turned on because most of the time I’m writing code in BBEdit.

Except, there are some languages (programming languages and markup languages like Markdown where whitespace is significant.

We can customize BBEdit’s behavior per language via the Languages preferences item. Select your language from the Custom Language preferences, as shown in the image.

You can set language level defaults for pretty much everything text related. What we’re interested in is the Files tab and the Strip trailing whitespace checkbox.

Now, as long as your language in the BBEdit document is set to Markdown it will no longer strip whitespace