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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.
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?!
Omnes stulti sunt.
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.
-- If an artist saw things as they truly are, they would cease to be an artist.
Errr ...
... lo and behold! "Use Emacs Key Bindings"
I use Emacs exclusively on my Mac, but firing up BBEdit and checking out the preferences, under "Text Editing"
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
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.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Pedro
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The Insomniac Coder