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

Nice Program

[sinclair44]

BBEdit was, is, and probably will be an awsome program for the Mac. It's emacs without the bloat. :) But everyone here's heard of it, right? RIGHT?!

Re:Nice Program

[Hanji]

I'd actually like to nominate jEdit as being the true emacs of the GUI age. It's about as extensible, customizeable, and scriptable, and it's even BIGGER!

(It's also an awesome editor, if you have the system resources to burn ~30MB RAM on a text editor)

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:hey

[neverkevin]

It is not on the front page, the story is only on the apple section.

Useful?

[muchmusic]

I can't find a use for BBEdit outside of this niche these days either. I once used it to open stubborn text files and the like (much like I once used GraphicConverter to open stubborn image files), but the only reference I've seen in software recently to BBEdit it in dreamweaver's option to work with this app to edit code and the like. I imagine that this experience is not unique - it seems that as more standards support is added to the mac os, and as file systems become stronger, there is less and less use for this sort of app.

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

Yawn.

[swdunlop]

SubEthaEdit, which was once called Hydra, has had both of these features for a couple months now. It also offers some pretty intriguing collaborative editing functionality, is written purely in Cocoa, and is both free and open. It integrated quite nicely with InputMethod extensions, like TextExtras, as well.

BBEdit was nice, before OS X and the availability of jEdit, jExt, emacs/carbon, vim and many of the other cross-platform editors. Now, it has fallen a bit behind the times, and is not worth the cost.

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.

Insanely Expensive Software

[ChuckleBug]

I can't understand why anyone would pay $179 for BBEdit. I have always liked its free version, and at one time was thinking of buying it, but I was poor at the time. Now that I *could* afford it, I can't see why I'd want to shell out that much for a text editor that doesn't offer any more than emacs, or vim, or a lot of others.

Can anyone explain how this app is worth $179?

Re:Insanely Expensive Software

[pudge]

I can't understand why anyone would pay $179 for BBEdit.

Because they don't realize you can download BBEdit Lite, then buy the BBEdit for the upgrade price of $119?

On a different note: an app you spend all your time in, that you rely heavily on, is worth a lot of money. I'd pay a lot more than $179 for BBEdit.

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.

Re:Insanely Expensive Software

[ChuckleBug]

I can't understand why anyone would pay $179 for BBEdit.

Because they don't realize you can download BBEdit Lite, then buy the BBEdit for the upgrade price of $119?

There is no longer any BBEdit Lite. That path made a lot more sense to me. But Bare Bones eliminated it.

I understand why someone who's been using it a long time and relies on it heavily would be willing to spend the money. I just find it hard to see why someone would switch from something else. But hey, if it's that good, and it's worth it to you, great.

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.

Re:Insanely Expensive Software

[mikeybee]

Well, I saved myself about ten hours of pain using the rectangular selection capability of BBEdit.fullvers to enable me to copy and paste contiguous rectangular chunks of HTML (headers attributes in tables... AAA-compliant financials are hell) That's worth about $500, so I'd say I was $321 ahead.

Re:Insanely Expensive Software

[icklemichael]

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?

Re:Insanely Expensive Software

[pvera]

The productivity gains I have thanks to BBEdit save us a ton of money per week. I work in a mac shop with Microsoft-based web apps (the horror!) and the workflow process is terrible and with little hope. What used to take hours of cutting and pasting to convert between totally dissimilar formats is now done 99% with just one click, thanks to the Perl filters and built-in features of BBEdit Pro. It is not just a speed advantage, it also saves us a ton on quality assurance, since with all this scripting we got rid of hundreds of places where errors could be added to the documents.

The one thing BBEdit cannot do is select a column from a HTML table unless there is a specific pattern I can regex for. That one task is done in Dreamweaver MX, everything else is done in BBEdit Pro.

BTW, mine was not $179, I got really lucky. I paid $79 for BBEdit 6.5 and like a week later 7.0 came out and they gave me a free upgrade.

Re:Insanely Expensive Software

[phch]

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.

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

Dreamweaver

[mgahs]

This is one of the main reasons I use Dreamweaver, so I can preview + tweak code at the same time.

If BBEdit adds the site management that Dreamweaver has, I may switch to BBEdit full time...

Re:Dreamweaver

[coolmacdude]

If BBEdit adds the site management that Dreamweaver has, I may switch to BBEdit full time...

Not going to happen. BBEdit is such a good program because it is simple. It is developed by Bare Bones software. It is a bare bones text editor. It does what it does and is the best at it. It's not going to morph into something else.

Re:Dreamweaver

[the argonaut]

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, and now with the Webcore preview feature, it's coming one step closer to being a WYSIWYG web page editor. Add in the FTP capabilities, remote editing, and the file group feature and you already have basic site management. All that's really needed is a bit of refinement and it's there.

On a side note, I have yet to find a web page editor with a site management feature I like. Unless there was something I missed in Dreamweaver MX or it's changed in MX 2004, the biggest thing I found lacking is that you can only synchronize between your local computer and one other system. The way I had my setup was a local copy for editing, a home web server for testing, and then I would upload to my actual server. Dreamweaver doesn't allow for a setup like this, so I would ultimately have to upload the files to my website manually either from my system or the test server. It also doesn't allow for the possibility that you could have one site spanning two remote servers without having to create a separate site for each system (although I am guessing this is a rare occurrence, I do know of one non-profit that I created a site for that had this type setup. What the reasoning behind it was I don't know, but since I didn't have control over it I just had to deal with it).

Re:Dreamweaver

[coolmacdude]

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.

Re:Dreamweaver

[Pope]

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.

Re:Emacs key bindings

[pudge]

The thing I really miss in bbedit is the lack of emacs key bindings

That reflects a lot more on you than on BBEdit. Go to Preferences->"Text Editing"->"Use Emacs Key Bindings". It's right there. :)

Minor nit

[Have Blue]

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

Re:hey

[dtfinch]

So that's what that checkbox did.

HTML

[PrintError]

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!

this sig is a muppet in hiding

Re:Emacs key bindings

[Hes Nikke]

i've been pretty close to ditching BBEdit (6.5 i admit, it's hefty upgrade for a TextEditor)in favor of a SubEthaEdit/Xcode combo. (SubEthaEdit for a live updating HTML preview, AND mutilple people working on the same file at the same time. Xcode for C/C++/Obj.C programing without other people involved) i might have to give the new BBEdit a try now that it has one of my favoroite SubEthaEdit features :)

(oh, and given that SubEthatEdit is cocoa, it's got your Emacs key bindings - freak)

This is not the HTML editor we need...

[Stormwatch]

Hand-coding HTML might be fine for geeks, but most regular users could use a WYSIWYG editor that is not as confusing as Dreamweaver and not as simplistic as Mozilla's built-in editor.

What I mean is, of course... good old discontinued CLARIS HOME PAGE. Someone has to make an editor that totally replicates CHP's interface and functionality, but that will generate modern HTML/CSS/whatever.