This is a ruby library for automating BBEdit. BBEdit has a lot of power to be automated, but AppleScript has some nasty rough edges, and this library/set of tools will hopefully smooth things out a bit for me. It comes with a couple of very basic command line tools that may be useful by themselves or as simple proofs of concept.

One is called "bback" that takes search output from tools like Ack and The Silver Searcher. Even though BBEdit has very powerful multi file find and replace, I sometimes prefer to search with ag/ack when I'm going through huge codebases. Use it like this:

$ ag BBEdit | bback

And you'll see something like:

Colors are Douce nuit from Luke Andrews.

The code for bback is a simple demonstration of what I have in mind for this library. Another tool is called "bbclipping", and inserts a clipping with the contents of ARGF. This makes it easier to synthesize clippings and run them on the command line.