WriteChangesWhenSentToBackground

[TJ Luoma]

I just wanted to make sure that no one else had missed what I think is one of the most useful¹ new features in BBEdit 

(¹ by which I mean a feature that has the potential to be used most often by the most number of people)

Quoting https://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/notes-13.1.html:

If you want text documents with unsaved changes to automatically save when switching BBEdit to the background, you can now do this with an expert preference:

defaults write com.barebones.bbedit WriteChangesWhenSentToBackground -bool YES

There are some more details in the release notes, which are worth reading if you are curious about this feature, but I've found this to be super useful and super fast, not to mention that it's one of these features that I wish every app would offer, because saving is the best way to avoid losing work if something bad happens.

For the past few years I've done something very similar using Keyboard Maestro and AppleScript, but obviously something built-in is better for several reasons, and I'll keep using it for a few Macs I have that are running versions of macOS which are too old for BBEdit v13:

-- With thanks to Christopher Stone and Rich Siegel 

-- Source: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bbedit/dfT5wJY5wSI/discussion

if application "BBEdit" is running then

     try

          tell application "BBEdit"

               set docList to (text documents whose on disk is true and modified is true)

               repeat with theDoc in docList

                    save theDoc

               end repeat

          end tell

     end try

end if

-- end of AppleScript 

Anyway, I only happened to see this because I'm a nerd about reading Release Notes, but even I have missed things in the Release Notes in the past, so I figured it might be worth highlighting this.

~ TjL