I've been using BBEdit as my compare tool on macOS for a few years now, but recently noticed that it keeps opening a window that's maybe 90% of my screen's width and height. That might be useful on a large monitor, but my 13" MacBook Air felt especially cramped.

Welp, to change the default size of a window in BBEdit, you apparently use the menu! Feels very OS 9-. /nostalgia

From "BBEdit > New Window Size & Location > Set Default" on ArsTechnica:

When I began my search for how to set the default location for new windows in BBEdite, I was certain that to set this required a "write defaults" from the command line.

Not so -- no need for BBEdit Expert Preferences for this ... it's in the menu:

Menubar > Window > Save Default <type of> Window

The Save Default Window command stores the position and size of the front window in BBEdit’s preferences, and BBEdit will create all new windows of the same type with the stored position and size.

In my case, the "type of" is "Difference".

So, to be overly clear, first open a difference window, size and position it to taste, and then run the "Menubar > Window > Save Default Window" jive.

I'm sure I've mentioned I've been using BBEdit since the year of its birth (not sure exactly, but certainly in 1992. I still fondly remember [a few years later] using it in tandem with Transmit). I'd wandered away from BBEdit for years, using Ultra-Edit on Windows for a while, then VIm, Visual Studio, and a number of language-specific editors (sort of like (and including) PhpStorm), Coda (super briefly), Sublime Text, and now largely (and largely happily) VS Code crossplatform.

It's kinda neat to have a daily use for the "old grey lady" of text editing again and to continue not to be disappointed in its feature-set. BBEdit doesn't suck.

Labels: BBEdit, noteToSelf

On Windows, I have two tools that get a lot of work when I'm ready to check in files:

1. Merge tool: KDiff3 -- since 2012, it appears.
   
2. Diff tool: WinMerge -- more recently; used to use KDiff3 for both
   

The WinMerge usage is recent-ish. When you want to compare two files and two files only, its simplistic UI is refreshing compared to the busyness of KDiff3.

One problem: KDiff3 uses KDE and is available pretty much everywhere. WinMerge is, um, Windows specific.

When I'm on macOS, I've been using BBEdit (nee TextWrangler) in place of WinMerge more recently and, I've found, you can use BBEdit as your official diff tool in SourceTree now too with a dedicated dropdown option.

One problem: SourceTree puts the more recent file on the left in BBEdit for some reason. That's not how SourceTree does it with WinMerge.

How do I swap that? Funny you should ask... Just ran into this SourceTree help request today that happens to show exactly how...

I spoke to BBEdit about this and they reminded me of the solution I had (with their help) implemented previously, before SourceTree added BBEdit to the official part of the external diff menu. I pass it along here, in case it is helpful:

in the "Diff Command" field, it needs the full path to bbdiff, e.g.

/usr/local/bin/bbdiff

I had been just putting "bbdiff" and that may have been the full problem I was having. In the "Arguments" field I put "--ignore-spaces --wait $REMOTE $LOCAL" and that seems to work well.

That still puts the newer edit on the left, but that's easy to fix. Swap $REMOTE and $LOCAL and...

Success. That's a nice, usable working environment I've almost got on macOS. 😉

Labels: BBEdit, git, macOS