Posts tagged ‘text editing’
Drafts and diet
April 14th, 2013 at 10:56 pm by Dr. Drang
Bad habits are insidious and hard to shake. As my wife went through cancer treatment, I began to eat poorly and too much. The modest discipline that had allowed me to lose 15 pounds a couple of years earlier seemed unimportant, and I adopted the attitude of “at least I’m not drinking.” Now it’s time…
The Markdown book and a bit of history
April 5th, 2013 at 11:36 pm by Dr. Drang
The day before I left on vacation, I got an email from David Sparks with a link to the PDF of the Markdown book he and Eddie Smith wrote. The freebie was nice, but even nicer was that David remembered that I don’t have an iPad and couldn’t use the iBooks version.1 No wonder everybody…
New flexible timestamps in Drafts
February 10th, 2013 at 6:13 pm by Dr. Drang
One of the least-well-kept secrets in the iOS app world is the big jump in functionality that Drafts has made in the revisions released in last few weeks. I’m pretty sure that by the time I’m done writing this post Federico Viticci will have figured out a URL scheme that will have it making his…
Depending on the kindness of strangers
January 27th, 2013 at 11:57 pm by Dr. Drang
In this post from yesterday, Adam Engst of TidBITS discusses how changes Apple made to Pages screwed up his workflow without warning. He contrasts Apple’s behavior with that of Bare Bones Software and how it handled a recent bug in BBEdit that also caused him grief. I’m sympathetic, but with some caveats. First, I doubt…
A line-numbering text factory for BBEdit
January 25th, 2013 at 10:39 pm by Dr. Drang
You know how you get into a certain mode of thinking and you miss the obvious? And then, when you finally do see the obvious, you feel stupid and embarrassed? Whenever I want to automate a process, I assume I should write a script. That’s my first thought and, too often, my last. Usually it…
Google lucky links in BBEdit
January 7th, 2013 at 7:40 pm by Dr. Drang
Last summer, I wrote a couple of scripts for creating Markdown reference-style links in BBEdit. One of them was for new links, the other was for reusing a link that’s already in the file. What I didn’t do, for reasons that aren’t clear to me, was write scripts for adding links from selected text via…
Markdown table scripts for BBEdit
November 4th, 2012 at 1:16 pm by Dr. Drang
The more you customize your editor, the harder it is to switch to another one. This is one of the reasons it took me so long to make the move away from TextMate; in six years of use, I’d accumulated a passel of commands, snippets, and specialty language definitions. The only thing more daunting than…
Photos and links in Markdown
September 25th, 2012 at 12:06 pm by Dr. Drang
I write my reports for work in Markdown and convert them into PDFs through a combination of MultiMarkdown, LaTeX, and some homemade scripts. I described the conversion process in a post last year. Today I’ll describe a new script that helps me do the writing itself in BBEdit. The format of a typical report looks…
Tidying Markdown reference links
September 17th, 2012 at 9:15 pm by Dr. Drang
Oscar Wilde—who would have been great on Twitter—said “I couldn’t help it. I can resist everything except temptation.” That’s my excuse for this post. Several days ago I got an email from a reader, asking if I knew of a script that would tidy up Markdown reference links in a document. She wanted them reordered…
Toggle tab stop lines in BBEdit
September 3rd, 2012 at 9:41 am by Dr. Drang
One of the things I missed when I switched from BBEdit to TextMate several years ago was what I called BBEdit’s “pinstripe” setting, it’s ability to show thin vertical lines at every tab stop. This can be quite helpful with long stretches of code, where it’s easy to lose track of how deeply indented you…
