| Home Catalog FAQ | Log In |
Bundle Discount!
Save 30% when you build your own bundle of three or more books, including Take Control of...
(30% discount overrides other coupons and is calculated on the first screen of our cart.)
Take Control of BBEdit
Learn how to take full advantage of BBEdit's text-processing power!
Is text a large part of your life? Do you write blog posts, code Web pages, search through log files, generate database reports, and regularly look for needles in textual haystacks? The best tool on the Mac for those tasks is BBEdit, from Bare Bones Software. But BBEdit is a deep program, and many people—even long-time users—are often unaware of or aren't taking full advantage of BBEdit's productivity enhancing features, such as grep searching, clippings, text completion, projects, context-aware HTML markup tools, FTP/SFTP browsers, version control software integration, template-driven HTML previews, and more.
Take Control of BBEdit, which was created in collaboration with Bare Bones Software, explains how to use BBEdit 10 to accomplish real-world tasks more efficiently than ever before. The book focuses on three main areas of usage: essential text-processing features for all BBEdit users, working with HTML from the level of the individual tag all the way to a dynamic Web site, and managing multi-resource projects.
- More Info
- Contents & Intro
- FAQ
- Blog
Read this 199-page ebook to learn how to:
Set up BBEdit for maximum efficiency:
- Configure key standard and expert preferences for optimal usage.
- Sync BBEdit settings and support files between Macs using Dropbox.
- Create text factories that automate sequences of text processing commands.
- Create "clippings" of boilerplate text, complete with dynamic placeholders.
- Use Dropbox or a version control system to track versions of documents.
If you use BBEdit at all, then buy Take Control of BBEdit, either for a head start or a tune-up... the information it contains is immensely practical and useful.
—Miraz Jordan, in MacTips
Start work on the right track:
- Collect multiple resources—including files, folders, and URLs—into a single project window.
- Use BBEdit's many options for opening and saving files.
- Work with remote files via BBEdit's FTP/SFTP browser windows.
Type faster, search better, and automate repetitive bits:
- Control BBEdit with keyboard shortcuts.
- Write faster with text completion of words, code snippets, HTML tags, and more.
- Clean up text with spurious tabs, incorrect case, gremlin characters, and more.
- Search for and replace text across multiple documents at once.
- Learn how to use grep pattern matching for powerful searches.
- Write in Markdown, and preview Markdown documents.
Compare and collaborate effectively:
- Discover best practices for commenting and revision tracking.
- Compare multiple versions of documents.
Run your Web site like a wizard:
- Create HTML and CSS files using BBEdit's effective, extensive markup tools.
- Preview dynamic pages locally with user-defined preview templates.
- Clean up old or badly coded Web pages.
- Build Web sites using templates and includes.
- Connect BBEdit to Fetch, Interarchy, or Transmit to edit remote files.
- Maintain Web sites in BBEdit using four different workflows.
Book Info
iPad & KindleAn EPUB is available to purchasers of this title; log in to your account to download it. More info... A Mobipocket file is available to purchasers of this title; log in to your account to download it. More info... |
About the Author
|
Book Reviews
Author Interviews
|
Glenn Fleishman is a tech journalist based in Seattle, where he lives with his wife and two sons, both of whom are adept at accidentally pressing the power button on his laptop.
He’s a contributing editor at
Table of Contents
|
Read Me FirstThis ebook teaches you how to use BBEdit 10 as an effective writing and editing tool, to create Web pages and manage Web sites, and to work efficiently with related files and URLs in projects. It was written by Glenn Fleishman, edited by Adam Engst, and published by TidBITS Publishing Inc. |
Introduction
Although BBEdit first appeared in 1991, I was late to discover its pleasures. While I wrote a fair amount of code in the 1990s, the mix of machines and jobs I had led me to use the screen-based editor vi (and its better vim variant). That’s what I cut my teeth on, and I just kept blindly using it. BBEdit was a programmer’s tool, and I only programmed a little. I was mostly a writer, although I regularly created and updated Web sites.
What finally overcame my reluctance to use BBEdit was Bare Bones’s gateway drug, the free TextWrangler, the successor to the more-limited BBEdit Lite. At a time when BBEdit’s retail price was around $125, TextWrangler was free, and it did much of what BBEdit offered. I was hooked. Most notably, TextWrangler provided so-called global regular-expression pattern matching, known as grep, using the same elements found in Perl and other programming languages. (I also started spending an increasingly large amount of time programming.)
I’ve found from talking to many colleagues—and even my own father, who designs small Web sites—that most of the repetitive, irritating, and manual tasks I performed in years past are common. But convincing people to try a program that has an intimidating number of features and a reputation as being for technical people is what led me to write this book. That reputation is undeserved: BBEdit is for everyone, and you can learn to use just the parts you need without becoming overwhelmed by those you don’t.
I didn’t just learn to manipulate text in TextWrangler, I also learned to use it to write. Both TextWrangler and BBEdit let you write without distractions. They display only plain text with, at most, some syntax coloring—coloring that differentiates coding (in programming) or formatting (in markup languages) from plain text or variable contents.
After using TextWrangler regularly for a bit, I moved up to BBEdit, because TextWrangler lacks several features: version control for storing, retrieving, and comparing multiple time-stamped states of the same file; text factories, little macros for carrying out sequences of actions; and other tools related to Web site management.
Even still, I continued to use vim for many basic editing tasks—until the Project feature appeared in BBEdit 9. In BBEdit, a project is a container that lets you reference (not copy or move) all the different text files, aliases, URLs, and folders associated with a particular, well, project, into a single bundle, regardless of where the actual files live. Projects have saved me innumerable hours, and I’ve become a BBEdit addict, to the point where I write nearly everything in BBEdit.
I want you to do the same. Any time you encounter a task that would result in wasted time and effort, or that involves text or collections of text files, whether they’re formatted as HTML or XML or CSS or plain old text, you can turn to BBEdit for a simpler and more satisfying resolution.
In this book, I look at three major tasks that BBEdit does exceedingly well, but that require mastering different parts of the program: working with text, managing Web sites, and using projects. The more I’ve learned in each of these areas, the more efficient I’ve become. Some weeks, I reclaim hours of otherwise wasted time. Plus, the results of my work are better! This book is a combination of a tutorial for features that, once mastered, you will use constantly, and a conceptual introduction to ways of working using BBEdit that will improve your efficiency and increase your professional satisfaction.
My goal is to take you from standing on the threshold of the BBEdit doorway to boogying down with the features within. Party on, reader!
BBEdit Quick Start
After explaining how to Get and Install Software, this book takes you through three topic areas: working with text; creating and editing Web pages and managing Web sites; and organizing your work with BBEdit’s Project feature.
To get the most out of this book, I recommend that you read (or at least skim) the Work with Words topics, which come first in the ebook. If you work with Web code, then you should read the Build Web Pages and Sites topics. And, if your BBEdit project has more than a handful of files, you should read about wrangling your documents in Manage with Projects.
Work with Words
BBEdit is a text editor originally designed for programmers. It has gradually evolved into a multi-purpose tool that works well for many different text-related tasks. The topics noted below look at how to use BBEdit best for writing, editing, and wrangling text.
Coders shouldn’t feel left out. When you need to write text at length within a program, edit Web pages, or clean up code, these same tips will help you.
Write:
- Arrange your virtual desk; see Set Up Your Environment.
- Learn how BBEdit handles new and existing documents; see Work with Documents.
- Take advantage of efficient ways to write text, count words, and check spelling; see Write More Efficiently.
Edit:
- Find ways to mark up text that you’re editing and work iteratively with others; see Mark Up Text with Text.
- Use BBEdit’s comparison feature to find differences between documents; see Define the Difference with Diffs.
- Install and use version-control software for backups, retrieving older drafts, and collaboration; see Track Changes across Versions.
Wrangle:
- Perform repetitive tasks with ease using text factories; see Crank Out Text Factories.
- Use clippings to insert text with placeholders for commonly used phrases and codes; see Insert Text with Clippings.
- Master single-file and multi-file searching, including the Unix-derived pattern-searching grep option; see Search and Replace.
Build Web Pages and Sites
Graphical editing of Web pages has turned out to be useful only for certain kinds of static sites. Many sites are now template driven, or have programming code (such as JavaScript and PHP) directly in their pages. BBEdit provides a straightforward approach to editing these sorts of pages, with plenty of help to sort out problems.
- Get familiar with BBEdit’s controls for writing HTML and CSS files; see Code Web Pages.
- Preview your HTML and Markdown files inside BBEdit or with browsers; see Preview Web Pages.
- Learn to clean up existing Web pages and validate them for syntactical accuracy; see Clean Up Web Pages.
- Take care of entire Web sites using built-in BBEdit features; see Manage Web Sites.
Manage with Projects
Folders let you keep track of files connected to a project in the Finder, but a document can reside only in a single project’s folder at a time. smart folders are an option—but they require that you rely on Mac OS X to manage where documents are stored, which may not be desirable or portable.
- Find out how a BBEdit project can bring together related files, folders, and URLs, making it easier for you to access and update those files; see the introduction to Work with Projects and keep reading in Learn the Parts of a Project Window.
- Get into the nitty-gritty using a project to organize your work more efficiently; see Create a Project.
Does this book cover ctags, scripting, and creating codeless language modules?
No, sorry, it's 199 pages as is, and for this title we wanted to focus on topics (text processing, HTML, and projects) that would be useful to the vast majority of BBEdit users. That said, if this book is successful, we hope to be able to cover such topics in a future edition or title.
Can I read this ebook on an iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, or Kindle?
There are lots of great ways to read our ebooks on these devices. For more details, please read our latest Device Advice.
Ask a Question
Feel free to ask us if you have a question about this title!
Send Us Your Comments!
How could we not publish such kind words? If you'd like to send us your comments (good or bad, though we hope they're all good), just click the Feedback link on the cover of your copy of the ebook. Be sure to let us know if we can publish your comment. Thanks!
Update Plans
December 14, 2012 -- Although it's not impossible that we would update this ebook in the future, at the moment we are not planning an update.
—Adam Engst
BBEdit 10.5 Simpifies and Adds Versions
December 5, 2012 --
Our friends at Bare Bones have updated BBEdit to version 10.5. The program remains largely as we described it with a few additions.
First, BBEdit now works with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and 10.8 Versions. Every document you create and save on a local drive with BBEdit automatically keeps tracks of revisions, with a new snapshot every time you save. The new Search > Compare Against Previous Versions menu item gives you access to check against previous drafts. This doesn't replace version-control systems like Subversion (SVN); rather, it makes it easier to avoid losing significant changes by accident, such as deleting text, saving the file, and closing it.
Second, the Sites feature, once in a palette, is now integrated into Projects. You can set a Project to map to a remote Web site, and use new consolidated preflight tools (syntax checking and other options) to make sure changes pages are ready to go before they're uploaded to a site. Most of the Take Control book's details on Sites remains useful.
Third, a new Go menu consolidates a number of features useful to programmers (including those writing JavaScript) for identifying functions, global variables, and other elements, and jumping among points set in a file.
Finally, the document toolbar has been simplified, with fewer icons and more features consolidated into one place. It also takes up less vertical space.
These changes affect very little found in the book, with the exception of a few interface elements and a few menu items in the Text menu.
For a fuller explanation of these details, see BBEdit 10.5 Adds Versions and Brings Web Sites into Projects at TidBITS.
—Glenn Fleishman
Glenn Fleishman Talks Text on MacVoices
March 12, 2012 --
BBEdit, the multi-bladed Swiss Army knife of text-editing, and the new Take Control book about it, is the topic of Glenn's most recent interview with Chuck Joiner of MacVoices. As wide-ranging as BBEdit itself, the conversation between Glenn and Chuck covers, among many other things, the different uses and users of the software, some of the cool things Glenn discovered on his book-writing journey, and, a special treat for the TidBITS fans out there, a description of how BBEdit is used in the TidBITS publication workflow. As is always the case when Glenn is on-mic, it's an entertaining and enlightening discussion.
—Michael E. Cohen
Visit our catalog to see all the other books we publish!
Teach classes? Check out our discounted class copy pricing!
Orders are processed for us by eSellerate on a secure site.
Copyright 2013 TidBITS Publishing Inc. | Privacy Policy | Contact | Follow on Twitter