A few months ago, I talked about Emacs and the various ‘fileset’ functions that were buried in it’s voluminous core of goodies. While somewhat obscured, and certainly not very accessible from the UI, they were there and were functional. They, in true Emacs fashion, allowed you to define filesets as whatever suited your fancy. If you wanted to define a list yourself, you could, you could also define a fileset as a folder of files and probably even have the list be dynamically populated by the result of a function. IDK, Lisps are all “data is code; code is data” and that’s cool.

BBEdit Projects

However, on macOS, BBEdit also has the idea of filesets. Actually a couple of different concepts. One, you may be familiar with is the ‘Project’. You get a list of files in a directory, usually defined around the root level .git folder and pow, fileset. However, you can also create filesets of disparate parts, and organize them however you like. You just create a blank project from the menu and start adding files and ‘collections’ (read: folders). This is handy when your project only has a few different key files you care about actually editing. I use this for my site, and for Fish Shell’s various config folders.

Similarly, you can setup a “disk browser” collection that just dumps the list of files in that folder into a project-like view. Bypassing the need to actually have any sort of structured project in the first place, just an assortment of vaguely related files.

Notebooks

Another type of fileset is the BBEdit “Notebook” feature. The notes feature works like an app bundle, in that there is a top-level “file” that behaves like one unit, and inside that file are discreet text files that make up the notes. These are usually named uniquely, but presented as whatever the top-level heading defines. Similar to projects, it has it’s own structure and the files are automatically maintained.

Everything else

There are a couple of other kinds of container-esque tools, but they’re more like special buffers in Emacs. Things like LLM Chats that happen all within one Markdown file. Or shell worksheets that act like a simple prompt that you can run commands in and have the output in BBEdit. It feels like BBEdit is really cribbing some of Emacs ideas. Not all of them, but there is certainly a vibe of picking up popular features and adapting them to something that GUI-trained users would be comfortable picking up and running with.