Product Reviews

BBEdit is one of the few Mac applications that's not only unique to the platform, but has long been a source of envy to Windows and Linux users. Ironically, given the Mac's reputation as a graphical machine, it has been the best product on any system for text editing. Version 8 not only cements this rating, but actually moves it further ahead.

The first thing most users will notice is the new interface. According to Bare Bones, one of the most common requests from users was for a version of the tabs used in Safari for keeping multiple documents open at the same time without multiple windows. However, as will be obvious to anyone who's used Safari, this approach works well for a handful of pages, but as soon as you open more than five or six, it becomes cluttered and much less usable.

As a solution to this, Bare Bones looked to a different model that accomplishes much the same thing: the Drawer. On the side of BBEdit's main window now appears as a Documents Drawer, which lists all open documents and allows you to switch between them quickly. There's also an Actions button at the top, which lets you perform common functions such as creating or closing a document, as well as 'undocking' it from the Drawer or comparing two documents. It's a neat solution that has two key advantages: it's much easier to use if you're dealing with numerous documents, and - unlike the tabbed approach - each one isn't redrawn even when it's not the foremost document, thus saving on your graphics overhead.

The feature with the most potential to change the way you use BBEdit is undoubtedly Text Factories. Similar to Automator - the software automation feature included in the forthcoming Mac OS X Tiger -Text Factories allows you to create complex automations using virtually every command included in BBEdit, as well as calling external AppleScripts or Unix commands if you want more flexibility and power. It's easy to see how Text Factories could be used to create completely automated systems for putting together complex web pages, or for any document with a particular text style. For example, if you work for a variety of publications, all of which

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have different house styles for words such as 'website' or 'Internet', you could quickly create a Text Factory that changes a document into the correct style.

However, despite it's attractions as a text editor, BBEdit has become better known for its use as a code-writing tool, typically for either HTML coding or programming - and there's plenty here to please hardcore coders. First and foremost is the addition of support for Perforce, the leading version management system and the one that's used by Bare Bones itself. Turn on Perforce integration, and the application gains a small 'P4' menu in the menu bar, which offers direct access to all the version control systems of the Perforce server.

Application coders will also be happy with support for Exuberant Ctags. This is a powerful tool for indexing and navigating source code, which allows you to generate index files of language objects - variable declarations, type definitions and the like. BBEdit can automatically scan the index files created by Ctags and use them to create contextual menus of objects, making it much easier to insert variable and other code elements as you go along. Ctags is supported in a wide variety of languages, including all the variants of C, Pascal, Perl and COBOL.

BBEdit's excellence as a web editing tool, however, has made it the tool of choice for web coding. Version 8 adds a couple of new twists that make coding much easier. The first is support for using the Apache web server built into Mac OS X as a preview server. This means that, instead of simply displaying a previewed page in your browser of choice, BBEdit pipes it to Apache first, which allows Apache to handle any CGI requests in your document before previewing. The result of this is that, rather than returning a page that lacks any content generated by CGIs, you get a far more accurate representation of your final document, without having to place it on a live or staging server. There's also added support for CSS 2.1, and an improved syntax checker, which includes the open source tool HTML Tidy, allowing you to quickly and easily tidy up some of the most common HTML errors and slippages.

Quite often with updates, it's tempting for a company to concentrate on either one particular aspect of the product and add a single new feature, or to expand it beyond its original markets into something new. Bare Bones has managed to avoid both these approaches, adding significant new features for the individual markets that BBEdit serves - such as Perforce support - while also including features such as Text Factories which will make the lives of all of its users easier. This is a great upgrade to an already-superb product, and should be an essential buy for every BBEdit user.