BBEdit is a pretty awesome editor. While I’ve moved to TextMate for most of my text editing, I’ll occasionally come back to BBEdit because it has the tools I need.

In a magazine article I once compared TextMate to a M*A*S*H style surgery theatre, and BBEdit to a hospital operating room. There’s a lot of time I really need it done (M*A*S*H style), and sometimes I need other features (like a split pane editor) where I need to pull out the big guns

Today I needed to edit four 1,000 line Ruby files, so I opened them up in BBEdit and split the pane for each file. This worked awesome until I needed to do anywhere in the file

You see. the files were written in the Domain Specific Language Shoulda” — which adds essentially a new way to declare functions to Ruby. TextMate sees these shoulda function declarations and adds them to the function popup, but BBEdit doesn’t

A quick conversation with BBEdit support, and I realized I needed to find the solution myself. So I wrote a proof-of-concept Python script: BBEdit-DSL.

If you’re using Ruby on Rails with BBEdit, and specifically Shoulda, you should check it out