I paste a column of data-all the answers to one question, each on its own line-into BBEdit, and then use BBEdit’s Process Lines Containing command, which lets you extract lines and do something with them-delete them, copy them to a new document, put them on the clipboard, whatever. The survey is a massive spreadsheet containing everyone’s answers to every question. This is where BBEdit saved me an enormous amount of time, and I thought I’d share what I did so that you don’t have to waste your time in the future. And yet at the end, I need to say “38 people said Han Solo, 24 people said Luke Skywalker.” And people don’t answer in a consistent fashion-they misspell things, phrase responses differently, you name it. The problem with these sorts of surveys is, they’re all based on free-form text boxes. (We did a version of this, with Apple themed questions, for the Relay FM 5th anniversary show.) Last summer I fielded a survey with Star Wars questions-but never wanted to do the hard work of compiling the answers. And BBEdit has, once again, been a life-saver.Ī recurring game on Incomparable’s Game Show podcast is a modern take on Family Feud, a show where contestants guess the answers that people gave in a survey. This week I’ve been getting caught up on work that I deferred during the last half of 2020 due to the 20 Macs for 2020 project and the avalanche of Apple releases.
Bbedit auto tab full#
Its full support for regular expressions would be enough. Even if I stopped writing in BBEdit, it would still be an indispensable utility because of all the other ways it saves me time.
I think the reason I stick with it is that it’s not just a writing tool, but a text processing tool.
Bbedit auto tab software#
BBEdit: A text utility, not just a text editorĪ lot of people are baffled when I explain that I do most of my writing on the Mac inside Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit, which is a text editor that’s loaded with features for software and web developers.īBEdit has been my primary writing tool for more than two decades, and yes, a lot of the time I’m just pushing the cursor from left to right, something I could do in Microsoft Word or Google Docs or just about anywhere else.