Excursus

BBEdit 9 has just been released. Too many features to list here, but this caught my eye:

BBEdit now handles the (badly chosen, IMO) “txmt:” URL scheme. This allows properly formed “txmt:” URLs generated by the Ruby On Rails “FootNotes” plug-in (and some others) to open files in BBEdit and (optionally) select a requested line and column. (NB: If the system doesn’t correctly recognize BBEdit as an allowable handler for such URLs, RCDefaultApp is a good tool for adjusting the bindings.)

Typed through gritted teeth no doubt. Though you have to give Rich credit—it’s real dedication to his users to swallow his pride and adopt an emerging standard instigated by a competitor. From the TextMate manual:

The txmt URL scheme allows you to open files in TextMate via hyperlinks found for example in HTML documents (anchors). These can refer to local files which can be useful when:

Using commands with HTML output that indicate errors/warnings with the current document, or refer to other documents in your project.

If you are generating a set of web-pages from simpler (text) files you can have these link to the original text files, so that when you are inspecting the generated result (in a browser) you can quickly edit the source of each page by following the txmt:-link.

The URL scheme is txmt: and currently has one command named open. This command takes up to three arguments:

• url — the (file) URL to open (e.g. url=file://~/.bash_profile), if this is left out, the current document is targeted.
• line — the line on which the caret should be placed after opening the file (e.g. line=11).
• column — the column on which the caret should be placed after opening the file (e.g. column=3).

Gloating done, the scratch pad feature also looks interesting. So if you are still using the text editor that doesn’t suck™, you should check out the new release.