BBEdit 9 released with 100+ new features

 

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Posted on 29 Aug 2008 at 09:10

Bare Bones has unveiled BBEdit 9, a substantial upgrade to the pre-eminent website, code and text editor.

New features include Projects, automatic text completion, editing in disk browsers and other windows, automatic text completion and a Scratchpad.

It also provides revamped Ruby language support, enhanced JavaScript support, updates to the ObjC, Obj-C++ and YAML language modules, transparent support for bz2 compression, and much more.

The Projects feature is, as the name suggests, a new way to organise all the files and folders for a single project. Files can be created, renamed and edited within the Project window, as well as organised into folders. Projects can contain any combination of directories and individual files, and their contents can be directly searched as well as processed by BBEdit’s text factories.

Extensive changes to BBEdit’s text engine now support editing text in disk browsers, search results, and other text panes within the application. They also include a text completion, designed to accelerate the writing of code and content by suggesting completions as typing is paused or upon request. Possible completions include words in the current documents and other sources, such as the system spelling dictionary, BBEdit’s own clippings and ctags. Text completion support applies to any language and can be configured on a per language basis.

The Scratchpad window, which is ideal for quickly editing or transforming text without having to create temporary files. Accessed via the Show Scratchpad command from the Window menu or Dock, the Scratchpad automatically saves its contents.

Other new features include: MobileMe syncing of the application support folder, which stores clippings, text factories and the like; improved awareness of Xcode; support for additional ctags formats; a new clippings set for PHP; and enhancements to the HTML and Markdown clippings sets.

BBEdit 9 costs £72.09, or £17.31 to upgrade from version 2.5 onwards. Education prices and site licences are also available. All the new features and changes are listed in the release notes.

Author: Simon Aughton