A while ago I wondered publicly if BBEdit was worth the high price of $200 that Bare Bones Software was charging. It appears that I was not alone in my thinking. A new version of BBEdit came out this week that not only offers new features but comes with a new lower price tag of $125. The upgrade price dropped too.

At version 8.5 BBEdit offers quite a surprise, too. The interface has been extensively modified and simplified for both the application and its preferences. For most programs a mention of changed preferences would be a bit silly, but as BBEdit has such an extensive preference set that its preference panel can actually be considered a part of its everyday operation.

Why the new version is numbered 8.5 instead of 9, up from 8.2 is a mystery. Bare Bones offered a .5 upgrade once before when BBEdit was made OS X native. That made sense. That was an important code porting effort but version 6.5 of BBEdit didn’t have a lot of new features over the old 6.

This update is a totally different animal. Besides an interface makeover, BBEdit added some welcome new features. The two most immediately obvious are code folding and menu bar customization.

Code folding, long a selling point for BBEdit’s main competitor TextMate and included with the latest version of Dreamweaver, is great. Toggle a little triangle and blocks of code fold up to un-clutter the workspace. Besides cleaning up a full page of code, the folding feature makes it easy to find closing tags and brackets, or the lack thereof. Its inclusion in BBEdit marks some serious catching up in an essential feature.

The other obvious change is in BBEdit’s new ability to toggle menu bar items. Use subversion or CVS a lot? Switch on a menu list and have it right there for you. Clippings, previously Glossary now has its own menu, which makes it easy to assign keystrokes to invoke commonly used snippets of text or code. Clippings are now easier to access and edit, too. As with most features in BBEdit, these are language sensitive.

Speaking of languages, BBEdit now offers syntax highlighting for Ruby, SQL and YAML. These were available as plugins before but it’s nice to see them incorporated into the core program. Bare Bones is now on the Ruby bandwagon, a place where TextMate has been the main Mac contender.

BBEdit’s already superior search functions have been improved too, adding PCRE and the ability to search and edit .gz files. It offers better JavaScript support, too, though I haven’t had an opportunity to use it yet. I have glanced at the excellent documentation and am looking forward to doing so.

Bare Bones claims almost 200 improvements and new features for BBEdit 8.5. The few I understand had me on the phone within an hour of downloading the demo to purchase my upgrade. Bare Bones forgot to update their shopping cart to include the new version and announce prices. That’s been taken care of but how embarrassing.

This is a major and badly needed update to a fine program that was falling behind in modern features. It has me back firmly in the BBEdit camp.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 9th, 2006 at 9:56 am and is filed under Editors, Pro User, Software Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.