BBColors 1.0

Sunday, 8 October 2006

One feature still lacking in BBEdit which I’ve wanted for years is a way to easily save and switch between different text coloring schemes. BBEdit’s text colors have been configurable ever since syntax coloring appeared in BBEdit 4.0 in 1996, but there’s no means to save or change them en masse. Nor is there any way to share color schemes with other users.

So, I’ve put together a little command-line tool called BBColors; it lets you save, load, and share text color preference schemes for BBEdit and TextWrangler.

To save your current color preferences:

bbcolors -save "My Cool New Color Scheme"

To load a saved scheme:

bbcolors -load "Some Other Color Scheme"

To read the full manual for the tool:

bbcolors -man

Saved schemes are stored as text files in a folder in your Application Support folder. Changes are applied to your BBEdit preferences using the Mac OS X defaults command.

More information, including the download link, is available on the BBColor project page here on Daring Fireball. A handful of example color schemes is also available.

To install a color scheme, just copy it to ~/Library/Application Support/BBColors/.

Enjoy.