Some features of the "bbedit" command line tool are discussed in this review of BBEdit 8.0:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/12/21/bbedit.html?CMP=ILC- macrss&ATT=BBEdit+8.0++A+Developers+Viewpoint

For my taste, the notable bits are:

(1) The '--clean' option for suppressing the 'Do you want to save changes?' dialog. (2) The tool is installed from a button in the preferences.

Just some food for thought/discussion for the eventual TextMate command-line tool. Chris

An Even Cooler Command Line I do quite a bit of work from the Terminal (well, iTerm, really) command line, and the new BBEdit Unix tool is useful in all the ways I wish the previous versions were. Before, I had to give BBEdit the -c switch to create a new document. Now, it figures that out on it's own. If I have the preferences set to open new documents in the front window, when the BBEdit tool opens multiple documents, they open in the same window.

The latest update makes it even better. I can now pipe output from a command line process into BBEdit without creating an unsaved document. That way, I don't have to go through the annoying "Do you want to save changes" dialog. Once I've seen it and want to get rid of it, I just close the document.

% netstat -rn | bbedit --clean

I wish I had this feature for the "Unix Script Output" window I get when I choose "Run" from the "#!" menu (which I've set to Shift-Apple-R with the "Set Menu Keys..." item from the BBEdit menu.

It gets even better, though. If I want to look at piped output, I want to read it from the top. Previously, BBEdit placed the curser at the end of the output, but I can now start off at the top of the output. % netstat -rn | bbedit --clean -view-top

To get this updated version of the command line tool, you have to go to the Preferences. In the Tools pane, click on the button that says "Install Command Line Tools," which installs the latest versions of BBEdit and bbdiff.