BBEdit Clippings
Popular Placeholders to Know
BBEdit Clipping allows users to add their own pre-defined bits of text into any document. There's no size limit and you can add special substitutions.
Creating Clipping
It's easy to create a snippet, in BBEdit simply select a text and right-click and then choose Save Selection As Clipping. It really is that easy.
Activate Clipping
You can activate a clipping by typing a shortcut or by assigning a key combination. The key combination is more powerful as you can apply the clipping to the selected text.
Example
This clipping snippet will apply a specific paragraph class to the selected text.
#SELECT#
Popular Clipping Substitution Placeholders
These are the five placeholders that are most useful to know. You can find all the placeholders in the official BBEdit Manual.
#INSERTION#
Marks the place where BBEdit will place the insertion point after inserting the item; if multiple #INSERTION# placeholders are used, the second and subsequent occurrences are replaced with a placeholder "<##>", which can be used with Go to Next/Previous Placeholder in the Go menu. Useful when you apply a snippet via typing and you want the cursor to appear within the snippet.
#SELECTIONORINSERTION#
If there was a selection when the clipping was expanded, it will be put at this position; otherwise, the insertion point will remain here. It is useful when you want to use a clipping as a keyboard shortcut or activate it when typing.
#CLIPBOARD#
Contents of the current clipboard. Useful when you want to use the clipboard as part of the clipboard substitution. For example, if you want to use a GitHub branch name.
#SELECT#
The selected Text. Useful when you want to wrap the selected text around tags.
#SYSTEM shell_script#
Given the full path to a shell command or script, BBEdit will run that command or script and insert the result. This is a pretty powerful way to apply external commands with your BBEdit clippings.
Shell Script Example:
#SYSTEM uptime#
This will tell me the current uptime on my computer. I save the clipping as "uptime" and anytime that I want the computer uptime, I just type uptime. (Not something I would do often but a cool example.)