The $PATH in BBEdit

[TJ Luoma]

Quoting the "BBEdit 13.1 Release Notes" from https://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/notes-13.1.html

> BBEdit has built-in support for cmark as well as "classic" Markdown (Gruber's original Markdown.pl script). In addition, if you have Discount, MultiMarkdown, cmark-gfm, or Pandoc installed, BBEdit can use those as well. If a particular tool is not installed, its corresponding option on the menu is disabled.
>
> Finally, the "Custom" option provides the means to specify your own rendering command and arguments. There are some rules that you must follow:
>
> The command name must be available in $PATH. You can specify a fully qualified path, but this is discouraged.
>

1. Where is BBEdit getting its $PATH definition from?

2. Can it be edited?

The reason that I ask is that for the past several years, macOS has had no good way to define the $PATH for GUI applications, and most do not even include /usr/local/bin/.

Since BBEdit can put a tool into /usr/local/bin/ then I assume it also includes /usr/local/bin/ in its $PATH but I also put scripts that I have written into /usr/local/scripts/ however there is no easy way to tell most GUI apps of that path except using a fully qualified path, so I'm wondering what I should do in BBEdit's case.

Obviously this would be easily fixable if Apple would create a way to define a $PATH for GUI apps, but since it took away the previous one and hasn't come up with an alternative for many years, I'm not holding my breath.

TJ

[Rich Siegel]

On 6/2/20 at 4:19 PM, luo...@gmail.com (TJ Luoma) wrote:

>1. Where is BBEdit getting its $PATH definition from?

Your Unix login environment (e.g. ~/.bash_profile or equivalent
for zsh or whatever shell it is you're using). So, $PATH should
be the same in BBEdit as it is in Terminal.

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.

[TJ Luoma]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 4:54 PM Rich Siegel <sie...@barebones.com> wrote:

On 6/2/20 at 4:19 PM, luo...@gmail.com (TJ Luoma) wrote:

>1. Where is BBEdit getting its $PATH definition from?

Your Unix login environment (e.g. ~/.bash_profile or equivalent
for zsh or whatever shell it is you're using). So, $PATH should
be the same in BBEdit as it is in Terminal.

1. That is obviously the smartest way to do it, and so I should have assumed that would be the way that BBEdit would do it.

2. For those new to zsh, make sure that your $PATH is set in ~/.zshenv 

3. FWIW, I have used this at the top of my scripts for a long time:

if [[ -e "$HOME/.path" ]]
then
     source "$HOME/.path"
else
     PATH=/usr/local/scripts:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/bin
fi

That way I can define a PATH in a file un-creatively named ~/.path and have it automatically apply to all of my scripts (which makes it easy to update/change), but if (for some reason) that file is not there, it will use my most commonly desired PATH.

TJ