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.

Comments

Re:Nice Program

[russellh]

But everyone here's heard of it, right? RIGHT?!

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.

Re:Emacs key bindings

[nosferatu-man]

Errr ...

I use Emacs exclusively on my Mac, but firing up BBEdit and checking out the preferences, under "Text Editing" ... lo and behold! "Use Emacs Key Bindings"

'jfb

Re:Kill a line

[SessionExpired]

So many times I want to just kill a line with a key stroke rather than selecting and cutting it.

Cmd-L, Cmd-X

mij

Re:Yawn.

[CoolMoDee]

From their FAQ

Did you think about releasing SubEthaEdit as OpenSource?
We are currently working on cleaning up and refactoring SubEthaEdit's networking and collaboration code. This will probably be released as a (open source) framework late(r) this year.

SubEthaEdit isn't open source *yet* but hopefully it will be sometime soon.

Re:Insanely Expensive Software

[moof1138]

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.

Minor nit

[Have Blue]

It's called WebKit, not "the Safari library".

Re:Insanely Expensive Software

[pudge]

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.