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BBEdit 14

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Re: BBEdit 14

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, I do this with Notepad++ too, and I know it's terrible. But it's just so.... automatic. I tell myself that nothing in there is truly critical, but I've also had a few instances of being pretty pleased to be able to "find in all open documents" and recover a bit history of what I was doing, or URLs for some research, or whatever.

I use Notepad++ like this too. But I try to use its split pane feature to keep all my scratch txt files out of the way of whatever project files I need open.

>scratch txt files

We started using rider at work and I already have made like 20 scratch files in under a week. It may become a problem soon.

Re: BBEdit 14

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uh, what? that does not sound like a feature to me - I expect that when I close a document without saving it is gone for good. Is there a way to turn that off?

Absolutely. (...checking preferences to make sure I am not lying) Yes! Absolutely. :) You can turn the feature off completely, and if it's enabled, you can set a time limit for "rescued" items before they're completely discarded, e.g., yo could set it so you have a day to rescue them, then they get truly deleted.

Thank you!

Re: BBEdit 14

#153
post #48

I really wish it supported keyboard rebinding. I really wish this. I would happily pay for it, over and over again, but the tab key behaviour when editing structured text is just ... wrong.

There's a whole preference pane called "Menus & Shortcuts" which lets you set new keyboard bindings for virtually everything. I'm not sure what behavior you're looking for with the tab key in structured text, but if you're complaining that by default it will replace selected text with a tab character rather than indenting the whole thing, you could always go to the Keyboard preference pane and check the box by "Allow…

I have never once — in a career as a professional programmer that is coming up on 30 years — needed to insert a literal tab character in a document I’m writing. Not once. I’ll check out the bindings control panel, but in the past (as of maybe v12) it has not been possible to always force the tab key to indent the current line.

Re: BBEdit 14

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's trivial to implement and much easier to use. ...unless you opened the document from a network share or removable media. Or serialization takes a long time. Or the storage device is slow. Or you don't have write permission in the file's original location and have to pull a potentially large file from somewhere to persist changes to some local position. Or the local storage device is full. A "always save" mechan…

You don't have to write in the same directory as the original file (and you definitely don't want to overwrite the original file). Original vi (and nvi) keeps the working copy below /var/tmp. If you can't write there, you have bigger problems. (just be consistent from which host you modify a file from ;-}

Writing to /tmp is great if your file is loaded entirely in memory. Not all programs do that for a variety of reasons. Like I said, it's the tons of edge cases that make "constantly save" problematic and far from a trivial feature.

Re: BBEdit 14

#155
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't your window manager give you a way to handle this?

Shouldn't your window manager just handle this for you, by moving the windows to the builtin display when the external monitor is detached, and moving them back again when it's reattached? (Like my Mac has been doing for I don't know how long?)

> I don't know how long?

Since 1987

Re: BBEdit 14

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to write in the same directory as the original file (and you definitely don't want to overwrite the original file). Original vi (and nvi) keeps the working copy below /var/tmp. If you can't write there, you have bigger problems. (just be consistent from which host you modify a file from ;-}

Writing to /tmp is great if your file is loaded entirely in memory. Not all programs do that for a variety of reasons. Like I said, it's the tons of edge cases that make "constantly save" problematic and far from a trivial feature.

/tmp often is a RAM based file system. Not the best destination for data intended to be permanently saved. (n)vi is primitive enough to insist in copying the whole file (usually not a problem with files meant to be edited interactively), but nothing stops a more sophisticated program to store only changes (transactions) and consolidate on request. Most software, certainly all interactively used, ought to be "crash-only" software [1].

[1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotos-ix/crash-only-softwa...

Re: BBEdit 14

#157
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standard in what sense? Surely Dart has its specific requirements like any other language. I'm not convinced it's possible to standardize such functionality without limiting yourself to a subset of what you might want to have implemented.

Standard in the sense that most languages and most editors have adopted it: https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/impleme...

In that case I'm not sure that it's "worth so much more". As I said, you end up with lowest common denominators, not with increased developer comfort. For example, in case of Common Lisp, I very strongly doubt that LSP supports such things as interactive resumable conditions, CLOS/MOP object model for cross-referencing, or image state and session handling. At least it didn't a few years ago when I looked at it. But sure, if you're not very demanding, something like LSP might be enough for you.

Re: BBEdit 14

#158
post #8

Thanks to using BBEdit for a decade now, I get bitterly disappointed whenever I re-open an application and it doesn't restore the windows and state it had when it closed. I've tried switching to both Emacs and Vim, but no amount of configuration nor third-party plugins could get them to work like this effectively. BBEdit works exactly how I want it to work out of the box, and I commend it for that.

> I've tried switching to both Emacs and Vim, but no amount of configuration nor third-party plugins could get them to work like this effectively.

Emacs can easily do this.

Re: BBEdit 14

#159
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a whole preference pane called "Menus & Shortcuts" which lets you set new keyboard bindings for virtually everything. I'm not sure what behavior you're looking for with the tab key in structured text, but if you're complaining that by default it will replace selected text with a tab character rather than indenting the whole thing, you could always go to the Keyboard preference pane and check the box by "Allow…

I have never once — in a career as a professional programmer that is coming up on 30 years — needed to insert a literal tab character in a document I’m writing. Not once. I’ll check out the bindings control panel, but in the past (as of maybe v12) it has not been possible to always force the tab key to indent the current line.

[shrug emoji] I have indeed needed to insert literal tab characters in documents, for a variety of reasons, from editing tab-separated value documents and other data files to programming where -- as shocking as it may seem -- we indented with tab characters rather than spaces. Also, of course, if "expand tabs" is on, the tab key inserts the appropriate number of spaces.

At any rate, I don't know when BBEdit may have added that preference. It's always, AFAIK, had "shift right" and "shift left" commands bound to Cmd-] and Cmd-[ respectively, which follows a pretty long, albeit informal, tradition of Macs apps using those for changing the indentation of existing text. (I get that it may seem awfully pedantic to separate "change indentation of existing text" from "change indent of text as you're typing," but if you've been using computers for 30 years, it's surprising you've never seen that before. The first time I selected text and typed tab and the indent changed, it actually wasn't what I wanted and I was pretty confused as to what the hell was going on, although of course I've gotten used to it since.)

Re: BBEdit 14

#160
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never once — in a career as a professional programmer that is coming up on 30 years — needed to insert a literal tab character in a document I’m writing. Not once. I’ll check out the bindings control panel, but in the past (as of maybe v12) it has not been possible to always force the tab key to indent the current line.

[shrug emoji] I have indeed needed to insert literal tab characters in documents, for a variety of reasons, from editing tab-separated value documents and other data files to programming where -- as shocking as it may seem -- we indented with tab characters rather than spaces. Also, of course, if "expand tabs" is on, the tab key inserts the appropriate number of spaces. At any rate, I don't know when BBEdit may have…

Fair enough, and I'm not saying that BBEdit is wrong, per se, but it is close enough to useable for me (as a very long time Emacs user) that when there's something off, it strikes me as really off.
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