#Bbedit find differences full#
#Bbedit find differences software#

I note the number of responses in a separate document, and continue on until IвЂ™ve dealt with all the popular responses. I can count how many entries are visible by looking at the line numbers on the left (which I donвЂ™t have on when IвЂ™m writing) or by looking in the document statistics at the bottom of the window, which indicate the number of lines as the third entry in that triplet of numbers. The results of my line processing are below:Д«ecause I was only searching for blue, this has extracted all the entries containing blue, whether or not theyвЂ™re Ocean Blue (not a thing), Bondai Blue (nope), Bonsai blue (nuh-uh), or more correct variations. (ThereвЂ™s still some strategy required here to get good results.) The command is set to strip all those responses out of my document and place them on the clipboard. In the example above, taken from the Relay FM survey data set, IвЂ™m extracting all the вЂњblueвЂќ entries from the document-after having already removed entries mentioning Blue Dalmatian.

I can formulate a query or two that will roll up even the most horrendously misspelled answers-I see you, Like Skywalker and Hans Solo. I paste a column of data-all the answers to one question, each on its own line-into BBEdit, and then use BBEditвЂ™s Process Lines Containing command, which lets you extract lines and do something with them-delete them, copy them to a new document, put them on the clipboard, whatever. The survey is a massive spreadsheet containing everyoneвЂ™s answers to every question. This is where BBEdit saved me an enormous amount of time, and I thought IвЂ™d share what I did so that you donвЂ™t have to waste your time in the future. And yet at the end, I need to say вЂњ38 people said Han Solo, 24 people said Luke Skywalker.вЂќ And people donвЂ™t answer in a consistent fashion-they misspell things, phrase responses differently, you name it. The problem with these sorts of surveys is, theyвЂ™re all based on free-form text boxes. (We did a version of this, with Apple themed questions, for the Relay FM 5th anniversary show.) Last summer I fielded a survey with Star Wars questions-but never wanted to do the hard work of compiling the answers. And BBEdit has, once again, been a life-saver.ДЄ recurring game on IncomparableвЂ™s Game Show podcast is a modern take on Family Feud, a show where contestants guess the answers that people gave in a survey. This week IвЂ™ve been getting caught up on work that I deferred during the last half of 2020 due to the 20 Macs for 2020 project and the avalanche of Apple releases.

#Bbedit find differences full#

Its full support for regular expressions would be enough.

Even if I stopped writing in BBEdit, it would still be an indispensable utility because of all the other ways it saves me time. I think the reason I stick with it is that itвЂ™s not just a writing tool, but a text processing tool.

#Bbedit find differences software#

BBEdit: A text utility, not just a text editorДЄ lot of people are baffled when I explain that I do most of my writing on the Mac inside Bare Bones SoftwareвЂ™s BBEdit, which is a text editor thatвЂ™s loaded with features for software and web developers.Д«BEdit has been my primary writing tool for more than two decades, and yes, a lot of the time IвЂ™m just pushing the cursor from left to right, something I could do in Microsoft Word or Google Docs or just about anywhere else.