Product Reviews

The facts speak for themselves. Despite Apple having shipped a free text editor, despite the ubiquity of Word for word processing, Bare Bones Software's BBEdit is the de facto standard when it comes to plain text editing.

Other publishers think so, too, and most serious programming or Web layout applications take advantage of round-trip editing with BBEdit, whether it be for HTML pages or writing code. What makes it so good? It doesn't get in your way, it comes with a set of immensely powerful tools for editing and searching, and it works with the various standard text-based formats.

BBEdit became a true Mac OS X tool with version 6.5. It featured syntax colouring for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Perl, Python, PHP 4, WML 1.2 and 1.3, Objective-C, Unix shell scripts and a new 'bbedit' command for the command line. The command lets you open files in BBEdit directly from the Terminal or pipe another shell command's output from shell commands into a BBEdit window. It also had a rebuilt grep engine and Shell Worksheets.

If that all sounds a little geeky to you, then you're probably right. In general, BBEdit is designed for people who have to do a lot of work with text, mainly programmers or raw-code Web designers. In version 7, the new features and improvements are aimed solidly at either one or both of these camps.

For starters, BBEdit 7.0 has dropped support for a slew of legacy programming tools: MPW ToolServer, MPW 411, Kodex, as well as the THINK C, THINK Pascal, and Symantec C++ environments. However, with the exception of ToolServer, these tools are probably all long dead, and in any case aren't much use under Mac OS X, given the excellent development tools that ship with every OS X machine.

Version cracker

Instead, Bare Bones has provided built-in support for Concurrent Version Systems (CVS), an open standard for working with source

Webmasters get a preference panel for defining local to remote Web site tools, allowing them to manage a number of large sites from BBEdit. This feature also enables you to specify template and include files, to take advantage of the program's powerful 'include directives'.

BBEdit's HTML users gain a couple of new features: there's now a Close Current Tag command, which closes the last open tag in your HTML - great if you're working with XML. Syntax colouring now includes support for ASP and VBScript, and is updated to include the latest PHP4 syntax. There's also XHTML 1.1 syntax checking support and a 'Leave Room for Palettes' preference, which takes account of active palettes when stacking open windows.

For once, most of the changes are for text editing. The line processing tools, for sorting and dealing with duplicate lines, now come in a grep flavour, which lets you use pattern searching. You can also store boilerplate text under glossary items that can be accessed via the menu or by user-defined keyboard shortcuts.

Perhaps the most important new feature is the easy-access multiple clipboard. Copy some text, copy some more text and cut some text from a different document. And then, from the Edit menu, you can display the various cuttings using the Show Clipboard command. This brings up a window that you can step through using forward and backward buttons.

Alternatively, you can use keyboard shortcuts (control-[ and control-]). For those who need to deal with fixed width table data, BBEdit finally gets its own version of Word's rectangular text selection. Hold down the option key and drag an area to select the text within. Great for stripping out prefixes and suffixes.

Plain sailing

All in all, this is a tremendous update for those who always have their heads inside BBEdit. In some ways, the previous upgrade has slightly taken the wind out of its sails, but, as usual, all the additions are well thought out, well executed and, above all, useful. It's often difficult to improve on an existing application. But BBEdit 7.0 is good example of how to make something better without bloating it.