Question

Is it possible to use the BBEdit command line tool and update it progressively.

Example: (echo -n "foo"; sleep 3; echo " bar") | bbedit
This will appear after 3 seconds, but I want it to display foo and then wait and display foo bar.

Answer 1

If BBEdit is set to reload files when they change, you can create a temporary file, open it, and write to it with an interval of 3 seconds.

file=`mktemp -t file`
bbedit $file
(echo "foo";sleep 3;echo " bar")>>$file

I haven’t found a way to pipe directly to BBEdit so that it updates after 3 seconds.