Text editors are the nerd's equivalent of a religion, complete with the blind allegiance and flame wars. On Mac OS X, the long-popular BBEdit religion was starting to look a little long in the tooth next to more recent upstarts like TextMate and others.
But BBEdit fans, your day has arrived. Bare Bones, makers of the venerable BBEdit, have handed down a new set of tablets bringing BBEdit alongside, and arguably far past, its competitors. BBEdit 9 packs in a host of useful new features including a project manager for organizing your documents, an excellent and very smart auto-completion feature, as well as integration with Apple's MobileMe backup system and quite a bit more.
While the update is packed with welcome additions, the two standouts are the Projects organizer and the auto-completion tool.
The new Projects feature is actually a more useful improvement of the old BBEdit File Group feature. But the File Groups were somewhat limited, lacking an attached editing window. The new Projects feature behaves just like you would expect – create a new project, add your files, click on a file in the Project list, and it immediately appears in the editing window.
Projects may contain documents and folders, as well as Collections, which are custom groups of documents that can be anywhere on any local or remote computer.
The auto-complete feature is also a nice addition, though by default it's a little over-aggressive at popping up suggestions. Luckily you can set the feature to activate with a shortcut key if the automatic version proves annoying.
The best part about autocomplete is that it can also expand code snippets – just look for the "C" graphic in the list. For instance, in the screenshot below, selecting the "stylesheet" option with the "C" graphic next to it would insert a full HTML tag, rather than just completing the word.
The auto-complete features are nice and the hotkey option works well but it would be nice to see some more fine-grained controls – for instance to ability to control the delay time before suggestions pop up or the option to turn it on and off by file type.
Another very obvious change is the new Find/Replace dialogue which as been greatly simplified, though for longtime BBEdit users it make take a little getting used to. Bare Bones claims that all the old functionality is still there, but there is one big difference – the search history list is now combined, there's no way to chose a pattern and replacement separately.
Other new features include Scratchpad, which the release notes say is "a space where you can manipulate text by performing quick transforms, manual edits, or batches of copy/paste."
The most surprising new feature is the Save as Styled Text option which allows you to save files as a rich text documents – quite a break from BBEdit's long, text-files-only stance. Fortunately, if you're the type that turns your nose up at styled text, it's an easy feature to ignore.
Other significant new changes include:
- Edit in Results Windows and Disk Browsers – The text views in browsing windows (disk browsers, search results, syntax-check results, and similar) are now editable; rather than having to open a file into a new window from such a browser, you can just edit it right there in the window's lower pane.
- Integration with MobileMe – If you have a MobileMe account, you can keep your BBEdit preferences and your Application Support folder synchronized across machines, preserving your Text Factories, Clippings, and more.
- Modeless Find/Replace Windows – Multi-file search now has a new window of its own, and both the single- and multi-file search windows are modeless, meaning you can work in – and copy from – open text documents without having to close the search window.
- Character-level Find Differences – Find Differences now uses the system "diff" tool for generating the difference ranges displayed in the application.
- Fix/ToDo Tracking – Track your coding tasks easily: Ruby, C, Obj-C, C++, and header files will now show commented FIXME and TODO items in the function popup.
- Preview in MS Windows browsers – BBEdit now recognizes application stubs created by VMWare Fusion 2.0's "Unity" feature, so that you can preview your HTML documents in Windows versions of Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer using Fusion.
For a complete look at everything that's changed in BBEdit 9, be sure to check out the release notes (you might also notice that the BareBones site has received a very nice makeover as well).
I've been using BBEdit since OS 9 and have to say that this is best upgrade since the app made the leap to OS X.
That said, there are a few minor quibbles to be aware of: the auto-completion is, as mentioned, aggressive by default – a longer pause option would nice. It would also be nice if there were a way to put the Project browser on the right side of the window; it isn't a huge deal but it would be nice to have to the option. And finally, the strange spell checking bug that's been bothering me since upgrading to Leopard seems to still be alive and kicking.
However, despite the nitpicking, BBEdit 9 is a fantastic upgrade. Of course, as such, it isn't free. Upgrading from BBEdit 8.5 is $30, though if you purchased BBEdit 8.5 after Jan 1, 2008, you're eligible for a free upgrade. A full copy of BBEdit will set you back $125.
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