Bare Bones Software, Inc.

With BBEdit, you can...

Exercise Total Control Over Text

• use BBEdit’s legendary text processing power in any Automator Workflow New!
• create, edit, format or clean up any kind of text, anywhere
• use BBEdit’s numerous built-in functions for converting, sorting, searching and replacing text
• locate and manipulate large volumes of text in small amounts of time with powerful text searching, including regular-expression matching and multi-file searching with file filtering—now with enhancements to multi-file searching flexibility and usability Improved!
• make short work of repetitive text-processing tasks—without scripting or programming—with BBEdit’s new Text Factories. Quickly and easily build a series of transformations and apply them to any number of documents Improved!.

Text Factories (top)

Text Factories increase your productivity by making it possible to quickly and easily apply as many of BBEdit’s powerful arsenal of tools as you need to achieve your goals across multiple files and folders, with just the single initial setup required. As a bonus, text factories operate in the background, allowing you to use BBEdit for other work while they’re running, and take advantage of multiple processors on machines that have them.

BBEdit features an array of powerful text transformations. Until now, there has been no easy way to apply more than one of these transformations at a time, nor to any documents other than the one in the front editing window. BBEdit 8 introduces the Text Factory, which allows you to assemble a list of text transformations that should be applied in order to a specified list of files (including files contained in one or more folders of your choosing, open documents, files and folders referenced by file groups, and individually specified files). A Text Factory can also run one or more AppleScript and Unix scripts against each file, further enhancing the power and flexibility of this new feature.

(click the image above to see it full size in a new browser window)

Text Factories are even more accessible with the new Text Factory Menu, Apply Text Factory command, and Text Factory Palette

BBEdit at Work Searching Text (top)

BBEdit displays invisible characters such as spaces, tabs, and carriage returns. In this example, we are using grep to delete the spaces at the beginning of each item’s line and the space before the data chunk with a tab and removing the extra lines between each line.

Enhancements to multi-file searching flexibility and usability

Support for multiple search and replace locations means that search and replace operations across multiple disjoint folders (such as multiple web sites) can now be performed in a single step; this significantly enhances productivity without requiring scripting or manual intervention. Since the application’s entire attention is no longer occupied while a multi-file search/replace is in progress, productivity is again improved. As a bonus, the multi-file search and replace engine takes advantage of multiple processors (on machines that have them) for even greater performance.

(click the image above to see it full size in a new browser window)