Section C.4. BBEdit | Perl Best Practices

C.4. BBEdit

BBEdit is a popular commercial text editor for Apple computers, considered by many Mac developers to be the best available. You can read about its extensive features, download a demonstration copy of the application, or purchase a full license for the software from http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/.

To configure BBEdit with the extra editor features suggested in this book, you might first need to create some local folders (in order to pre-empt the application's default support folder). See the application's user manual for more information.

Then, adjust your preferences settings. In the Preferences > Editor Defaults screen:

Turn on Auto-Indent.
Turn on Balance While Typing.
Turn on Auto-Expand Tabs.
Turn on Show Invisibles.

Adjust your tab stops to four spaces. For BBEdit 7, use the configuration panel under TextFonts&Tabs. For BBEdit 8, the option is under TextShow Fonts.

You can create stationery for any boilerplate file templates you wish to be able to load by using BBEdit to create a file containing the desired code. When the code template is ready, select FileSave As... and turn on the "Save as Stationery option. Save the file to the folder ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit Support/Stationery/ and it will then be available from the Stationery palette, or via the standard menu item File"New with Stationery. You might, for example, create the stationery files ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit Support/Stationery/perl application.pl and ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit Support/Stationery/perl module.pm.

To use an abbreviation in BBEdit, you need to install a Glossary item. First, create the folder ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit Support/Glossary/Perl.pl/. Then, add a file named debug, with the following contents:

  use Data::Dumper qw( Dumper ); warn Dumper [ #SELECT##INSERTION# ];

The Glossary will now contain a debug item whenever a Perl file is opened. Selecting that item will wrap the specified text around the current selection, which will be inserted in place of the #SELECT# marker. The insertion point will then be placed wherever the #INSERTION# marker was, and the marker will be removed.

You can create as many glossary entries as you wish. For example, a ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit Support/Glossary/Perl.pl/benchmark file might contain:

  use Benchmark qw( cmpthese ); cmpthese -10, {     #INSERTION# };