BBEdit 13.5.2 as external editor for Joplin

[Matt]

I'm trying to get BBEdit configured as the external editor for Joplin and so far not having much luck. I saw on the Joplin Discourse forum that another user encountered the same issue, which is that BBEdit will launch but then not display the contents of the text file. That person who asked in Joplin's forum had switched to using Atom, but it was proposed that there might be a command line flag that BBEdit needs, and I wanted to check here. I could not figure out what would be needed. If I use /Applications/TextMate.app or /Applications/FoldingText.app as paths, everything works as expected. The only configurations options in Joplin for editors are path and argument. Since BBEdit is launching, I know I have the path correct, and I confirmed it has full-disk permissions. Any ideas would be helpful, or also to know if the way Joplin handles external editors just won't work with BBEdit.

[Rich Siegel]

On 14 Nov 2020, at 20:40, Matt wrote:

> I'm trying to get BBEdit configured as the external editor for Joplin

> <https://joplinapp.org/> and so far not having much luck. [...]

I don't use Joplin, and I don't know how it works or how you have it
configured.

I tried it out and found that the obvious notion of pointing the
external editor preference at /Applications/BBEdit.app(*) has bugs: it
launches the wrong BBEdit (one is already running) and doesn't seem to
open the note at all.

On the other hand, specifying "bbedit" or "/usr/local/bin/bbedit" with
an argument of "-w" appears to do nothing, and reports no error.
("emacs" behaves similarly.)

So if there's a way to tell Joplin to run a command-line tool for the
external editor, I would expect that to work and perhaps it's worth
filing a bug report with Joplin about that.

I have no idea how Joplin works internally so I have no further insights
to offer.

R.

--
Rich Siegel Bare Bones Software, Inc.
<sie...@barebones.com> <https://www.barebones.com/>

Someday I'll look back on all this and laugh... until they sedate me.

[Matt]

Thank you, this is helpful, and I'll file a bug report with Joplin.

[Greg Raven]

If you're using BBEdit, why use Joplin? Why not have a project with whatever folders you need, and create your notes in Markdown? With a little forethought, you can make your entries in such a way that project-wide search finds whatever you want. The best thing is that you are not locked into a proprietary program. Not to cast aspersions on Joplin, but many of these smaller software companies tend to disappear. By using Markdown files in BBEdit, there's virtually no way you would ever lose your notes.

[Matt]

Mainly because I had a lot in Evernote that I was able to import, and it handles the resources/attachments that went with my notes. It's open source and hopefully will be around for awhile, but I have had some issues with syncing lately, and I may move in the direction of folders and markdown files.

[jjon]

apropos of Rich's observations above, I posted the following on the Joplin Discourse page:

This may be a bug. If it isn't, it's jut not very intuitive. I had a similar problem: if I had the external editor set to /Applications/BBedit.app in Joplin's Preferences, then every time I tried to use the external editor, BBedit would spin up a whole new instance of the application and reproduce the state of the one already open, complete with duplicates of all open windows and documents. I tried setting the external editor to /usr/local/bin/bbedit with a variety of arguments, and that didn't work at all. What worked was to to leave the external editor setting in Joplin's preferences blank and set bbedit as the default editor in the shell configuration (in my case .zshrc) by adding the line setenv EDITOR "bbedit -w". Now when I ask for the external editor in Joplin, Joplin does the right thing: looks for the default editor and sends the note there. The note opens as a new document in the frontmost window of the running instance of BBedit.