Move BBedit 9's Documents drawer to the left side

Nov 18, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: robg

I've been trying to move over from Smultron to BBEdit for most of my text editing needs, as Smultron isn't officially supported any longer. One thing that I found very annoying in BBEdit 9 is that the Documents drawer appears on the right, with no apparent way to move it to the left (in older versions, I believe there was a preference to change the side).

In the "read more" portion of this hint, you can read my original solution to this problem, left in place for posterity's sake. However, commenter bhas points out a much simpler solution in the comments to this hint: just Command-click on the Drawer icon, and the drawer will flip from one side of the window to the other, and stay on that side for subsequent launches.

This also works in TextWrangler.

Original solution:

After Tweeting about this annoyance, I found the solution courtesy of a Tweet from @methodphoto; he pointed me to this message in the BBEdit Talk archives, which discusses the MultiDocumentWindows:PreferredEdge preferences value.

With that knowledge, it became relatively simple to figure out how to put the drawer back on the left side of the window. Quit BBEdit, then run this command in Terminal:

defaults write com.barebones.bbedit MultiDocumentWindows:PreferredEdge -string Left
Relaunch BBEdit, and the Documents drawer will open on the left. I'm not sure why I prefer it there; probably because I often resize my editing window, and with the drawer on the left, the list of open files isn't moving around all the time. If you decide you prefer it on the right, quit BBEdit, and delete the pref you just added:
defaults delete com.barebones.bbedit MultiDocumentWindows:PreferredEdge
On next run, the Documents drawer will open on the right-hand side of the window.

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