Opening Files Together in a New BBEdit Text Window

Friday, 17 September 2004

As mentioned in my BBEdit 8 review, BBEdit offers a few new options (in the Documents panel in the preferences window) to control the behavior of the new multi-document text windows. You can either have new and opened documents open by default in the front window, or you can have them open by default in a new window by themselves (i.e., just like BBEdit 7 and earlier).

These options are perfect if you want just one window with all your open documents, or if you want to stick with the traditional one-document-per-window model.

But what I want is something in-between. By default, I want documents to open using the traditional individual-window model. But I also want to be able to open a group of related files all at once, together in a single new window — in a single action from the Finder.

So, I wrote an AppleScript to do this, which I’ve named “BBEdit - Open Together”. I’m using it with Brent Simmons’s free Big Cat Scripts contextual menu plug-in, so that from the Finder, I can simply select the files I want to open and then choose it from the Scripts sub-menu that Big Cat adds to the Finder’s contextual menu. To use it with Big Cat, copy the script below, paste it into a new Script Editor document, and save it here (in “Script” format):

~/Library/Application Support/Big Cat Scripts/Files/

This script might be useful regardless of your default document-opening preference.

[Update, 30 March 2005: Scripting improvements in BBEdit 8.1 have made this much easier than it was in BBEdit 8.0. See the updated script here.]

Here’s the source:

on main(file_list)
    tell application "BBEdit"
        set w to make new text window
        set show documents drawer of w to true
        set show navigation bar of w to true
        -- Get the ID of the untitled doc created with w:
        set doc_id to ID of document 1 of w
        try
            open file_list opening in w
        end try
        -- Close the untitled doc created with w:
        close document id doc_id
        activate
    end tell
end main

The main handler is Big Cat’s idiom for the main loop of the script. If you don’t want to use Big Cat, you could change main to open, and save the script as an application, which you could then invoke via drag-and-drop.

Here’s how it works.

Regardless if you’re using a Big Cat main handler or an open handler, file_list is a list of aliases, one for each of the files selected in the Finder (if you’re using Big Cat) or dropped onto the script application.

We start by telling BBEdit to create a new text window, and save a reference to that window as w. We then make sure the document drawer and navigation bar in the new window are both displayed.

Next comes the only part of the script that’s vaguely tricky. When you create a new text window in BBEdit, it automatically contains a new untitled document. There is no way to create an “empty” text window containing no documents; when you close the last document in a window, the window goes away.

So, for now, we store the ID property of the untitled document in the new window. Every item in BBEdit’s scripting object model has a unique ID.

Next, we tell BBEdit to open the list of aliases in file_list. There’s no need to loop through the list and open them one at a time — in fact, for a long list of files, it’s considerably more efficient to tell BBEdit to open the list in one statement. The in w is all it takes to open these files in the new text window we just created. If we left off the in w, the files would open according to your preferences.

At this point, we have one last bit of cleaning up to do: closing the untitled new document that was created when we made the new text window w. We can’t use an index like document 1 of w or document 2 of w, because we don’t know what the index number is for the untitled document we want to close. Each window’s list of documents is sorted alphabetically. This is why we stashed away the ID of the untitled document — because IDs are unique.

(We couldn’t close this document before opening the files in file_list because it was the only document in w at the time, and so the entire window would have gone away when the document was closed.)

Lastly, we use the activate command to pop BBEdit to the front. This brings every open BBEdit window forward; if you’d prefer only to pop the newly-created window forward, you can change the activate line to:

tell w to activate

Perl Implementation

(Added 21 September 2004.)

Chris Nandor ported the above script to Perl:

My sentiments about BBEdit’s new feature to allow opening files into the same window are similar to John Gruber’s. The difference is, I rarely use the Finder for opening files, compared to how often I use a terminal.

I wrote to [Bare Bones] asking them to add a feature to the bbedit command line program allowing opening of multiple files to a single window, but in the meantime, I ported John’s AppleScript to Perl (which also allows it to be used, unchanged, with Big Cat).

Very useful if you open files from the command line, plus it’s a good example showing how to translate AppleScript into Perl using Chris’s Mac::Glue module.