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BBEdit 7.1 Adds Safari-Based Preview
A user writes, "BBEdit has added a 'Preview in BBEdit' command in 7.1, so you can preview HTML inside BBEdit itself, using the Apple's Safari libraries." Also added is support for SFTP (file transfers over SSH), Rendezvous discovery of FTP servers, and more. Just-released version 7.1.1 adds more refresh options for the Preview feature.
I used the free version 2.1.3 for years but Alpha has been my main text editor on the Mac since 1993 or so. Now that is the closest a real mac app has ever gotten to emacs.
must... stay... awake...
It is not on the front page, the story is only on the apple section.
The thing I really miss in bbedit is the lack of emacs key bindings. So many times I want to just kill a line with a key stroke rather than selecting and cutting it.
bbedit is really showing its roots as a carbon app by not having these things which all other text windows in OS X have.
The other thing I'd like would be a nice context sensitive pretty-indent for computer languages. Emacs binds this to the tab-key but bbedit does not seem to have it. which is odd since it does have context sensitive coloring so you know its language aware.
I dont really care too much about the proliferation of exotic special use features without some of these more basic universal editing features.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Cmd-L, Cmd-X
mij
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SubEthaEdit isn't open source *yet* but hopefully it will be sometime soon.
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BBEdit is really really nice. Personally I hate emacs. I write a lot of Perl and HTML. I now spend my time bouncing between BBEdit and vim - BBEdit for local editing, vim for time when I am SSHed in somewhere remote. BBEdit is definitely far nicer to work with, though I find GUI text editor inherently superior. BBEdit has rectangular selection - I would hate to imagine how you would implement that in a non-GUI editor. BBEdit also has a lot of features where you might in theory be able to do the thing in another editor, but it is a pain. I always dread complex replacing in a selection of text based on a regex in vim. In BBEdit it is intuitive. And BBEdit has a lot of other features that vim does not have, or that vim/other editor has but it is such a pain in the ass to find or use that it may as well not have them. BBEdit is scriptable via any scripting language out there that runs on OS X - AppleScript, Perl, Python, sh, whatever. I have written custom Perl filters for it, they integrate seamlessly.
BBEdit makes a great HTML editor for those of us who prefer to do it by hand. The HTML debgging and validation in it are brilliant and outshine competitors on any platform. And its abilities for testing pages easily in multiple browsers has saved me a lot of aggravation.
Finally it makes a brilliant IDE for Perl - sure you can run scripts from an editor in vim and others, but BBEdit is better. I love having a Perl debugger where I can doubleclick on an error and have the offending line hilighted. It makes a good IDE for shell scripts too.
If you write code professionally that BBEdit excels at editing (HTML, Perl, etc.) then it is likely to be worth it. If not, you probably aren't going to be compelled to purchae a text editor, when there are decent (though inferior) free ones.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
It's called WebKit, not "the Safari library".
There is no longer any BBEdit Lite.
It is no longer supported, but it is still available, and it still qualifies for the "BBEdit 7.1 Cross-Upgrade from BBEdit Lite, Adobe GoLive, Macromedia Dreamweaver (3.0 or later)" price of BBEdit. Shrug.
I just find it hard to see why someone would switch from something else.
And I find it hard to see why people like the New York Yankees. Shrug.
Somewhere around BBEdit 4 or so I may have agreed with you, but not anymore. BBEdit has been suffering from feature bloat ever since people figured out it was a great HTML editor
As far as software goes these days (what isn't bloated?) BBedit is one of the least bloated and highly focused programs out there. They have added a few more features recently, but I see them as more of a useful extension of what it already did rather than unnecessary junk.
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BBEdit has rectangular selection - I would hate to imagine how you would implement that in a non-GUI editor
What? You mean like ctrl-v in vi? :)
There is a way to do it in a tty in (x)emacs but I can't remember what it is, in x with xemacs it's just meta and the left button.
Does anyone know if it's possible to do a rectangular selection in eclipse?
Well I'm extatic about this. I'm not a huge fan of making web pages, but I have to do it quite often for school. I do all of my sites in raw html to ease the boredom, and I use BBEdit exclusively. Being able to preview right in the program will make it that much easier to get my pages right faster.
Thank you Bare Bones. I have a feeling my productivity just went WAY up with this upgrade!
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In answer to your question, it is the most popular text editor for the Mac ever, to the point that many Mac users consider it essential to OS X even being condidered worth having. It's popular with web people, but anybody who needs to edit a lot of text can use it.
Personally, I prefer it over emacs... but then again, I'm more of a vi guy when stuck with a command prompt, so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask.
As another poster mentioned, Ctrl-V in vim has allowed rectangular selection for some time. In emacs, cua-mode allows rectangular selection as well, and it's easy to use.
I've heard nice things about BBEdit, but if you use several platforms regularly (not just mac), I find a cross-platform editor is preferable. Besides, it's unlikely that BBEdit will ever be able to support such specialty needs as a mode for the IDL language.
I sort of agree, except I'd use 5 as the "best" available edition. 6 went Carbon, and even in OS9 the speed of window updates and file saving went down a noticible amount. I used to handcode sites for a living, and in 6 these slowdowns were annoyances that were offset by better search/replace (after I bugged them on a MacNN review page that drag and drop broke! That's sloppy QA in my opinion) and OSX compatibility.
I can't seen upgrading to 7 at this time, since I don't code for a living at the moment. One feature that BBEdit has needed desperately for years (IMO) is the ability to customize the HTML layout like HomeSite has had since version 3! Dammit, I want all my left justified, and TR indented 1 tab and TD indented 2 tabs. Makes cleaning up others' code a pain in ass.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.