BBEdit for OSX as an external editor is empty

Support
1

I have seen topics related to this issue but not found a solution so I thought I’d give it a go…
I love my Joplin app, I use Windows and MAC. In Windows I have set the external editor to Notepad++, in OSX I have set it to BBEdit.

When I want to edit a note however from Joplin (watched and unwatched) the BBEdit app opens but the editor is blank. Is there an argument in the Joplin settings that I have missed or is there something else.

Best wishes

Dj

2

Hi Dj, hopefully someone else can be of more help, but it looks to me that this is an issue with BBEdit, you probably need an additional command line flag to specify a file to open directly.

3

Hi there… Yeah well I’ve cheated a little bit and changed to Atom which works great. I really only use an external editor to check my terrible spelling, which works great in my Windows laptop but now it’s equally good using Atom… Thanks very much

Dj

4

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.

5

For anybody who has (had) the same problem. Jjon's solution has worked for me TO OPEN and EDIT a note in the following config:

  • Joplin 2.14.20 on MacOS
  • editor installed is called "drafts" (a formidable markdown editor from the appstore)

However, it is totally unclear how to make changes to the note and then SAFE the changes so they show up in the original Joplin note.

I understand there are too many configurations to cover them all in the related help text, but a little more advice (and an update to this help text) might really be useful.