Wednesday, October 14, 2020

BBEdit 13.5

Bare Bones Software:

BBEdit has a new feature to protect your data: in the Text Files preferences, there is an option: “Rescue untitled documents when discarding changes”. When this option is on (as it is by default), and you close an untitled document (one that has never been saved to disk), and click “Don’t Save”, BBEdit will save a snapshot of that document’s contents to disk.

[…]

Added a command to the Palettes submenu: “Markdown Cheat Sheet”. This opens a floating window showing common Markdown constructions. Double-clicking on an item will insert it into the active document; you can also drag an item to insert it where desired.

[…]

When running on macOS 10.15 and later, there’s an additional command on the Window menu: “Move to [Display]”, where “[Display]” is the name of an eligible attached display.

I wish macOS in general had better ways of moving windows between displays and spaces. Why can’t I pick up a window, press the Mission Control hotkey, and then choose where to drop it? Instead, you have to go into Mission Control first, find the window that it just moved out from under you, and then wait for the hover animation before you can even see the other spaces.

Update (2020-10-14): It looks like macOS can do what I suggested, but only if “Displays have separate Spaces” is unchecked. Alas, I really prefer my displays to be linked on the same space.

Previously:

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> Why can’t I pick up a window, press the Mission Control hotkey, and then choose where to drop it?

You can click+hold the titlebar of the window to move and then hit a shortcut of the target space (Ctrl+1, 2.. by default) to move the window to that space (and switch to it).

> BBEdit will save a snapshot of that document’s contents to disk.

Emacs has had it for decades. Sublime Text and VS Code both do it too. Glad BBEdit finally caught up to the 20th century?

It is unfortunate that Apple has never made any of the Spaces APIs public so they can't be used to develop reliable window management tools (well, not unless you are willing to risk using private APIs).

@Dillan, I think you misunderstood. BBEdit has been preventing data-loss for unsaved and never-saved files forever.

What is new in 13.5 is yet another safety layer: If you close a file that you never explicitly saved (but that got auto-preserved on disk by BBEdit all along) and then choose "Don't save" as you close it, the data still is not gone. Instead, you can restore the file within 7 days (with default settings, this interval is a user setting).

VS Code definitely does not have this feature and I would be surprised if Sublime or Emacs had it.

@Peter Yes, I’d love for you and Many Tricks to be able to do cool stuff with those APIs.

@NSSynapse Yes, I don’t recall seeing any other apps that do this. Emacs will save changes to files that had been perviously saved, but not unsaved ones as far as I know.

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