Tuesday, August 2, 2011

BBEdit 10 is out

Essentially that is the new. That and the fact that eventually they dropped the price to reasonable levels (39 $, IIRC). Unfortunately, the upgrade from older versions is also 39 $ (so I just bought a new serial).

The real question is why I keep buying BBEdit. I suppose I'm nostalgic about the old MacOS. It is a good editor, nothing to say that. I find it excellent with HTML and also has a nice PostgreSQL mode (not just SQL, it supports PosgreSQL dialect). The syntax highlighted grep searches (that is to say, regular expressions in fact, not grep) is another nice feature.

Other nice features are the possibility to customize the different modes (e.g., Python tab 4 spaces, auto-expand tab -- that is to say that tabs are not written in the source). Nothing other editors do not have, still, it is quite easy to customize. A couple of nice features is the fact that trailing whitespace stripping and trailing newline addition can be enabled. Once again, nothing vim and Emacs do not have, but easy to setup and somewhat missing in other "lesser" editors.

Among the addition of version 10, BBEdit has improved project management features, support for different color schemes (before that, a hack had to be used -- and the hack is forward compatible: color schemes for that can be used for the official feature).

While when I first tried TextMate I thought the next big thing after Emacs and vim was there, BBEdit is just a solid MacOS X editor. I like the fact that many a program is aware of BBEdit and lets me use it to edit stuff (and that is usually an improvement over the built-in editor). I will not stop using Emacs or vim for my serious editing, but BBEdit is a nice tool to have around.

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