I have just switched from the wonderfully full-featured TextWrangler to its big brother BBEdit, created by the insanely talented and wonderfully generous BareBones Software. I’ve been using TextWrangler for over five years now and swear by it, not only is it completely free to download and use but comes with so many features that, for me, it’s the defacto Mac text editor. The reason for upgrading to BBEdit is to gain a couple of power-features including collapsable code sections. After upgrading I found that the modal search dialog has been replaced, I’m sure it has its benefits but personally I much prefer it the way it’s presented in TextWrangler and earlier versions of BBEdit. After much searching I found a way to revert back to the modal search dialog, to do this simply open up Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and issue the following command:
defaults write com.barebones.bbedit FindDialog:UseOldSk00lFindDialog -bool YES
If you’re a fan of the new search but are upset at the lack of keyboard shortcuts then fear not as they’ve just been changed. This is taken from the BBEdit manual:
It’s not possible to use the command-key equivalents from the old modal Find dialog to toggle items in the Find window because those equivalents collide with the equivalents for different menu commands. Instead, BBEdit offers a new group of keyboard equivalents for controlling Find and Multi-File Search window items. The factory defaults for these keys are as follows:
- Case sensitive: Control-shift-N
- Entire word: Control-Shift-E
- Grep: Control-Shift-G
- Selected text only: Control-Shift-S
- Wrap around: Control-Shift-W
- Open search history: Control-Shift-H
- Open saved patterns: Control-Shift-P
If these assignments overlap with any keyboard equivalents for clippings that you’ve set, or if you just wish to change them, you can do so via the “Find Windows” section of the Menus preference panel.
