Stop BBEdit From Auto-Creating Projects When Opening Directories With bbedit

The BBEdit 9.3 release notes say:

BBEdit offers a new behavior: when you ask it to open a folder, rather than creating a disk browser (which allows only one document open at a time), you can ask it to create a temporary project. […]

There is no GUI for changing this behavior. If you want the old behavior back, use this command line:

defaults write com.barebones.bbedit Misc:MakeTempProjectForFolderOpen -bool NO

I’ve briefly tried using Projects a couple times, but they’ve never clicked with me. So I always set this.

However, when I set up my new iMac a year ago it didn’t work, and I didn’t bother to figure out why. I thought maybe the hidden preference had finally been dropped (currently using v11.6) and I’d have to learn to live with Projects. I don’t know why I didn’t check my mid-2011 Mac Mini. Fast forward to today, and I notice that bbedit . on the Mini does not open a project. A quick look through the defaults read output, and it turns out Misc: was dropped at some point.

Even knowing this now, I still can’t find updated instructions through Google. Hopefully I’ll be able to find this blog post the next time I need to figure it out.

defaults write com.barebones.bbedit MakeTempProjectForFolderOpen -bool NO