I don’t know about you guys but I’m continually frustrated with the lack of BBEdits file browsing system…. I find myself constantly opening up finder double clicking through folders and files just to get my workspace set up properly. And even after multiple times of looking through menus and options I couldn’t find anything that resembled a file browser….. So I just attributed it to BBEdit’s style of ’simplicity’. But then something interesting happened today.

I tried to open up an new HTML page by guessing with cmd+opt+N and to my surprise up opened a mysteriously looking window, one that so closely resembled my long fought after File Browser, and guess what? It was a File Browser! I investigated further into this to unveil that what I really wanted is what BBEdit calls ‘File Groups.’

Now these ‘File Groups’ are pretty cool, you can create a complete mashup of files that you use on a basis, you can save any state that they were in and you can also dump urls and cool stuff like that in there. When you want to launch your workspace just open up the file group and pick up where you left off. Awesome.

And to my power-user delight I also realized that nested in the secret (or not so secret) ‘New’ sub-menu was an option to setup my FTP server! So now I don’t have to open up CyberDuck, Transmit, or whatever to pass the files over, and when I want to start working on stuff I just open up the file group.

Anyways, thought I would share this. I had literally looked through what I thought was every menu in BBEdit, but did not think to check the ‘New’ Sub-menu in ‘File’. Woops ;p

lata

John

PS. I know Dreamweaver has most of these setting write out of the box, but I prefer a lighter text-editor like BBEdit in most situations.