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October 13, 2019

BBEdit 13: Keyboard Maestro to the Rescue

Two of the things that irritated me about BBEdit in BBEdit 13: It Sucks a Little - Bicycle For Your Mind:

  1. No support for substituting two spaces for a period.
  2. No support for capitalizing the first letter of every new sentence.

The solution for me is Keyboard Maestro macros.

The Problem

When you create a macro to turn two spaces into a period, the next letter is just a letter to Keyboard Maestro and not the start of a new sentence. You have to build a macro which does both. Turn two spaces into a period and capitalize the first letter of the sentence which follows.

The macro1.

Macro 1Macro 1

There must be a way to do this elegantly. My approach is the brute force one. One macro per letter. This particular one takes two spaces followed by the letter a, and changes it into a period followed by a space and the capitalized letter A.

You have to duplicate this for all the letters of the alphabet. The brute force.

What About a New Paragraph?

We need a new macro for the situation where you type two spaces followed by two returns and a new sentence2.

This is the macro I use for that.

Macro 2Macro 2

Again, brute force application of the macro by repeating it for every letter of the alphabet and you have a solution which lets you be lazy typing.

Is This Worth It?

I could type better, but I have the same features available on the iPad and macOS and I have gotten into the habit of doing this. I should undo this bad habit but in the meantime, these two sets of macros work in BBEdit, Sublime Text 3 and TextMate.

Problem solved with a definite absence of elegance.

The third thing which irritated me about BBEdit was the lack of typewriter scrolling. I haven’t found a solution for that yet.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie.

Thanks to: Pixabay for the image.

  1. My expertise with Keyboard Maestro is at a novice level, though I have used it for a while. My macros are minimal but effective and they are designed to do a job and that is the extent of it. There must be elegant solutions that elude me. I am not a programmer and it shows. If you can improve these macros, please send me an email and tell me about it. Thanks.↩

  2. I always use two returns to separate my paragraphs. If you use one return get rid of one of the \r.↩


BBEdit Keyboard Maestro

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