Anyone use BBEdit for code or Markdown and is NOT an "old school" Mac user?

[karlnyhus]

Nowadays (old and retired), I type a lot of Markdown into Noteplan’s excellent Markdown editor, but BBEdit is also always open on my Mac for miscellaneous text and Markdown tasks.

For example BBEdit has the chops to roll up a year’s worth of voluminous Daily Notes in Markdown format without bogging down. And BBEdit’s Text Colors setting allows me to mimic the Markdown theme that I use in NotePlan. And, of course, BBEdit can open just about ANY type of file for me to poke around in and satisfy my curiosity.

I’ve tried too many text editors to count, but BBEdit is the one I settled on at home on my Macs.

My working career, however, was spent on Windows and UNIX. I used the excellent Windows editor called EditPlus (with John Gruber’s Perl script installed to support Markdown syntax!) On UNIX, I used the classic vi editor (always present on any UNIX-like system I had to log into!) Also lots of anonymous editors built into Java IDEs like NetBeans, IntelliJ, and Eclipse.

[brookter]

Syntax highlight comes from Preferences > Languages.

1. Change the Default language for new documents to Markdown (optional)
2. In the extensions pane, make sure there’s an entry for md under extension and Markdown under Language

Click on Custom Settings, and then double click on the Markdown line – create it using the + key if it’s not already there.

In the new dialogue box that appears, make any changes you want (e.g. to Editor for fonts and editing behaviour, for example) , but make sure to click on the final tab for Markdown, and in that choose ‘MultiMarkdown’ as the Markdown processor.

After you close the dialogue you should be set up to go: any new file, or new files with .md will default to MultiMarkdown syntax highlighting.

To change the colours: Preferences > Text Colors and scroll down till you get to the Markdown section.

But…

The syntax highlighting doesn’t differentiate between italics and bold, and there’s no built in shortcut for them either, or for footnotes, or tables etc.

However, people have written applescripts which do many of these things and you can install them easily enough. Brett Terpstra (he of Marked 2 fame) has a very good set at Markdown Service Tools - BrettTerpstra.com, but there are others.

Compared to more bespoke solutions, it’s all a bit rough and ready. Basically, I’m not sure you’d buy/use it for its Markdown features alone: you use if you write everything else in BBEdit and want to use it (and its unparalleled text manipulation features) for Markdown as well.

Personally, I rarely start a text in BBEdit – there are other comfier editors – but I often open existing complicated texts in there to do some heavy duty manipulation.

An example: if I copy a CSV table from somewhere into a Markdown text in DT3, it’s trivial to open the document in BBEdit and convert the CSV to Markdown table format, but it’s something many other bespoke editors struggle with.

[karlnyhus]

@brookter

After you close the dialogue you should be set up to go: any new file, or new files with .md will default to MultiMarkdown syntax highlighting.

All the text and Markdown files that I create use “.txt” as their file extension. In BBEdit you can select the “language” treatment for a file from the drop-down at the bottom of the BBEdit window:

[brookter]

Indeed. But the standard extension is .md and I prefer to maintain the distinction between Markdown files and plainer plain text, so I have the default set up to reflect that. It means I don’t have to mess around changing extensions if I don’t have to.

[karlnyhus]

@brookter

… plainer plain text …

I liked your use of the phrase “plainer plain text!” I got a chuckle out of that

Markdown is not an actual file format. It is simply a way to handle and display any plain text file that may or may not contain markup characters associated with the Markdown syntax.

That said, people have different preferences regarding the extensions used with Markdown-formatted files. Over the years these extensions have varied. For instance, I believe that John Gruber still uses “.text” as his preferred extension.

Many Markdown editors are configurable for a variety of extensions. I configure the NotePlan and Byword apps that I use with “.txt” extensions.