Bbedit turn off hints6/24/2023 ![]() Edit in Results Windows and Disk Browsers – The text views in browsing windows (disk browsers, search results, syntax-check results, and similar) are now editable rather than having to open a file into a new window from such a browser, you can just edit it right there in the window's lower pane.Fortunately, if you're the type that turns your nose up at styled text, it's an easy feature to ignore. The most surprising new feature is the Save as Styled Text option which allows you to save files as a rich text documents – quite a break from BBEdit's long, text-files-only stance. Other new features include Scratchpad, which the release notes say is "a space where you can manipulate text by performing quick transforms, manual edits, or batches of copy/paste." Bare Bones claims that all the old functionality is still there, but there is one big difference – the search history list is now combined, there's no way to chose a pattern and replacement separately. The auto-complete features are nice and the hotkey option works well but it would be nice to see some more fine-grained controls – for instance to ability to control the delay time before suggestions pop up or the option to turn it on and off by file type.Īnother very obvious change is the new Find/Replace dialogue which as been greatly simplified, though for longtime BBEdit users it make take a little getting used to. For instance, in the screenshot below, selecting the "stylesheet" option with the "C" graphic next to it would insert a full HTML tag, rather than just completing the word. Thanks, Bare Bones! Zap Gremlins is saving me time, and helping me get my customers back to blogging in comfort.The best part about autocomplete is that it can also expand code snippets – just look for the "C" graphic in the list. I realize finding gremlins in the clipboard text will be useful to approximately 0% of you, but I thought it was a good opportunity to demonstrate how AppleScript support for the features of an application can turn out to serve incredibly particular needs. Although adding the text to a BBEdit document and manually examining the gremlins wasn’t too much of a time waster, it was still a bit boring and tedious. What is the character? Where is it exactly, and most importantly of all, shows the character in context, replaced by a bullet for easy visibility. It gives me all the details I would normally have to work hard to figure out. Find Gremlins takes the text contents of the clipboard, runs Zap Gremlins on it to find the gremlins, and then displays a summary of what it knows about them. Thanks to AppleScript support for the Zap Gremlins function, I was able to whip up a pretty handy script to streamline this operation. Whereas I want as much information as I can get about them, so I can effectively communicate to the user (and also so I can catalog what types of characters users are running into trouble with). It’s more aimed at eliminating the beasts than examining them. ![]() Then I can point out the location of the offending character to the user, they backspace it out of existence, and life goes on.Īs relatively painless as BBEdit’s function makes the task, it’s not really perfectly suited to what I need. But in the meantime, I’ve been resorting to handling the customer support inquiries by myself taking the user’s example text into BBEdit and looking for gremlins. I’d like to add something similar to MarsEdit, so I can spare users the pain of having to figure this out when run into an error dialog such as the one above. Their fine editor, BBEdit, has a dedicated tool just for rooting these suckers and either eliminating them or making them visible: Zap Gremlins. I’m sure there are a lot of different names for these unwelcome guests in text, but I like the one the folks at Bare Bones use: “gremlins”. When you end up with one of these bad boys in your post, the only hint you might get is if you are moving the cursor around with the arrow keys, you might see it “hiccup” a second while it stops on the invisible character. These tricky characters are especially sinister because you can almost never see them. What happens on most systems when you then go to publish, is you get a very unfortunate error message in return. So if you flub up at the keyboard and make some wacky keystrokes, you might end up with a weird “invisible character” in your blog post. ![]() It takes what you type or paste into it a bit too literally. ![]() MarsEdit has a little shortcoming that can cause a vexing situation from time to time. Daniel has always been quick to reply directly to emails and I am pleased to see his detailed post on how to fix this annoying problem. Occasionally I have run into the problem described below. I use a wonderful blog writing tool called MarsEdit.
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