Take Control of BBEdit

by Glenn Fleishman

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 even long-time users are often unaware of BBEdit's productivity enhancing features, such as clippings, text completion, projects, integration with FTP and version control software, sophisticated HTML/CSS preview, and more. Take Control of BBEdit explains how to use BBEdit 10 to accomplish real-world tasks more efficiently than ever before. The book focuses on three main areas of 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. Read this 199-page ebook to learn how

199 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

I started writing as a child and never stopped. I’ve always been interested in what makes things tick and how to explain that. That led to a career as a technology journalist and how-to article and book author. I’ve written dozens of books over my career in some combination of the two.

In the 2010s, I started publish a series of book that combined printing and type history and technology in a variety of ways. These titles include Not To Put Too Fine a Point on It, a collection of essays and reporting; London Kerning, a look at two magnificent London printing collections and the city’s typographical history; Six Centuries of Type & Printing; and How Comics Were Made, a heavily visual history of the production and reproduction of newspaper comics from the 1890s to the present.

I live in Seattle, Washington, with my family, and drink very little coffee.

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tib­its Publishing’s latest Take Con­trol volume provides a starter to power-user tour of Bare Bones Software’s BBedit. This short volume by Glenn Flesih­man provides a con­cise, focused and well delivered guide to get the most out of BBedit — one of the most mature text edit­ing envir­on­ment avail­able for OSX. The tone is dir­ect, groun­ded in Flesihman’s deep per­sonal exper­i­ence with BBedit, is well illus­trated and tar­geted explor­a­tion of three prin­cipal tasks: work­ing with text, man­aging web­sites and using pro­jects. The logical lay­out of the volume mae­ans it is help­ful as tutorial to gain imme­di­ate famili­ar­ity with BBedit, but also a solid ref­er­ence source to be con­sul­ted when you need to do some­thing specific.

I have long been a fan of BBedit much as the author of this volume. I have long thought though that I haven’t been using it to its poten­tial. I much appre­ci­ated this book as it gave me new insight on using mark­down, and how to more effect­ively use the very power­ful doc­u­ment com­pare and manip­u­late func­tion­al­ity. The other big win for me is get­ting a bet­ter handle on the ver­sion­ing con­trol that BBedit offers. Fleish­man offers, within a very com­pact and con­cise deliv­ery, a volume packed full of valu­able and imme­di­ately use­ful dir­ec­tion to max­im­ize your use of BBedit.

It’s got all sorts of help­ful tips through­out which have made the Take Con­trol volumes so use­ful. Tasks are clearly iden­ti­fied and step by step dis­cus­sions util­ise a recipe approach to provid­ing instruc­tion in pro­gram fun­da­ment­als. The book cov­ers all the main bases in the pro­gramme and after pro­ceed­ing through it myself with a copy of BBedit open I feel I am far more aware of the more power­ful aspects of BBedit and have a greater sense of how I may be able to use them myself for text manip­u­la­tion. As I men­tioned, I really like the tips provided and all the more so that many are ded­ic­ated to help­ing you work more effi­ciently with the programme.

This is a great book for novices and experts alike and is guar­an­teed to help you get more out of what is a cru­cial pro­gramme in the OSX arsenal.