BBEdit finding
December 13, 2014 at 4:36 PM by Dr. Drang
BBEdit’s system for finding text is both flexible and easy to understand, but it can be inefficient if you don’t use keyboard shortcuts for switching between its options. I suspect many BBEdit users don’t even know the shortcuts exist.
You bring up the Find window through either the menu command or the ⌘F shortcut. All of the checkboxes and buttons in the Find window have keyboard shortcuts, which you can see, one at a time, by hovering over them. I think it’s better, though, if you can see them all at once:
To me, the most important items are the checkboxes along the bottom. The state of the checkboxes is whatever state you left them in during your last search. Because I frequently change the type of searching I do, being able to quickly change the state of those checkboxes is the key to efficient searching. If you find the screenshot a little too small to read comfortably, here’s a table with both the default shortcuts and mine.
| Checkbox | Default shortcut | My shortcut |
|---|---|---|
| Case sensitive | ⌃⇧N | ⌃⇧C |
| Entire word | ⌃⇧E | ⌃⇧E |
| Grep (regex) |
⌃⇧G | ⌃⇧G |
| Selected text only | ⌃⇧S | ⌃⇧S |
| Wrap around | ⌃⇧W | ⌃⇧W |
They all use the ⌃⇧ prefix, and most of them use the first letter of their label by default. The only one I changed is the one for case sensitive searching. I just never could train myself to associate that with N, so I changed it to C in BBEdit’s shortcuts settings:
I confess I almost never use saved patterns, accessible through the popup menu labeled with a g,
The action buttons along the right side of the window all use ⌘ as part of the prefix. The button uses, in addition to the Return key, ⌘G, which Mac users should recognize as the standard “Find Again” key. Similarly, the button uses ⇧⌘G, which is also commonly used as the “Find Again, But Backwards” key.
By the way, do you know about the ⌘E shortcut? In BBEdit, it’s explicitly shown as the shortcut for the command, but it works in most Mac programs. Select some text, hit ⌘E, and the text will be put on the “find pasteboard.” Subsequent taps of ⌘G will search forward for that text (and ⇧⌘G will search backward for it). Using the ⌘E/⌘G combination is a very efficient way to find later instances of a string. I use them all the time to quickly move from where a function is defined to where it’s called. And, as I said, it’s available in most Mac programs.
Finally, we come to BBEdit’s command, which has a keyboard shortcut of ⌥⌘F.
Live Search, like the ⌘E/⌘G combo, can be faster than bringing up the Find window, but that speed comes at the cost of some flexibility. Live Search is always case-insensitive and does plain text searching only—no regular expressions allowed. It does, however, wrap around regardless of your last setting in the Find window, which is handy.
The reason I don’t bother with simple text editors, even those that have nice features like live Markdown formatting, is that their limited capabilities keep you at a beginner level, no matter how long you’ve been using them. Serious text editors have a depth that rewards their users.
Update 12/14/14 3:18 PM
Here’s a Twitter discussion on the history of the ⌘E shortcut.
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Personally, I think Grep should be called Regex because Regex is more descriptive, but I know BBEdit has a decades-long history of calling it Grep, so there’s no way it’ll be changed now. ↩
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I’m sure there’s a good reason to label this button g, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe that’s part of the reason I don’t use it. ↩
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Or ⌃S, which BBEdit inherited from Emacs. ↩