There’s much more to like in BBEdit 13, but the new GREP Cheat Sheet and Pattern Playground knocked my socks off.ĭon’t take my word for it. Release Notes: Dwight Silverman's weekly tech newsletter featuring insights, news and occasional whimsy about the latest in the industry The second cool new thing is an interactive GREP Pattern Playground, which makes it easier to fine-tune your GREP search or replace patterns without affecting the underlying document. Click the appropriate command in the list - which includes options for finding only capital letters lowercase letters numbers from 0 to 9 any digit characters repeated X times, characters at the beginning (or end) of a line (or a word), and many others - and the correct command magically appears in the Find or Replace field.
![bbedit grep cheat sheet bbedit grep cheat sheet](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kHDuh.png)
Click it and a list of common GREP commands appears with examples and a description. The first is a GREP Cheat Sheet button in the Find (and Replace) dialogs. But BBEdit 13 adds two new features that make using GREP almost as easy as using Search & Replace in other apps. In the past, I would have to search the web for the proper GREP syntax and then fine-tune it by trial-and-error. In English that would read: “Find every Space character repeated one or more times and replace it with one Tab character.” Word processors (and Ulysses) offer no easy way to search for multiple spaces in a row and replace them in BBEdit, I just type a space followed by a + (“ +”) for the Search pattern and “/t” for the Replace pattern. For example, I often need to change a bunch of consecutive spaces to a single Tab character.
![bbedit grep cheat sheet bbedit grep cheat sheet](https://tidbits.com/uploads/2019/10/Grep-Cheat-Sheet.jpg)
Ulysses offers a decent enough search and replace function, but when things get complicated, I turn to BBEdit and craft a GREP query.
![bbedit grep cheat sheet bbedit grep cheat sheet](https://thesweetbits.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/bbedit-review.jpg)
(GREP stands for G lobally search a Regular Expression and Print, or Global Regular Expression Parser, depending upon whom you ask.) For example, BBEdit has included powerful GREP searches for as long as I can remember. Why? Well, while Ulysses is great at letting me compose text, it’s not really designed for sophisticated text manipulation and searches.