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Review: BBEdit 6.0.1 SimpleText is a joke. I learned to write HTML in SimpleText way back when Netscape 1.0 was brand new. WYSIWYG editors like Adobe Pagemill and Microsoft Front Page came along before long, but they were frankly pretty lame. Soon after, I discovered a great little shareware gem called BBEdit Lite. For me, the feature that took me away from designing in SimpleText forever was the colors. This joyous little marvel would render your tags in different colors. I immediately decided to set my anchors to red, images to green, and general tags to blue. BBEdit version 6 ruined all that for me. After wondering what the full product was like, I soon began buying the full versions starting with 4.5. To say that BBEdit is SimpleText with flashy tag colors is a gross underrepresentation of a vastly complex text editor. It's truly the most powerful piece of software I've ever used. When I use a new version of Photoshop for a year or so, I eventually find all the new additions, and I feel like I've mastered all the program's controls. Not so with BBEdit. You might notice that I'm reviewing the new 6.0 version three months after its initial release. (The newer 6.0.1 upgrade has some coloring upgrades, KeyChain dependance fixes, and a couple other minor changes) The thing is, I'm sure I've barely scratched the surface of what version 4.5 can do, but I continue to get the upgrades because even though I know I'm still not realizing the full potential of this amazing product, there always seems to be some little improvement that's worth the price of admission. And don't be scared off by the fact that BBEdit is so extensive and extensible. It's something to be thrilled about, not frightened of. It's like your future needs from a text editor have almost all been thought of and already implemented. Not many apps can boast of being so far ahead of most of their users. This time the improvement that thrills me is so tiny and seemingly lame that it's probably laughable from a non-user's standpoint. Now the automatically "Soft Wrap Text" preference actually applies to those documents that were not originally created "soft wrapped". I know it doesn't seem like a big deal, but when I had to do it after opening any and every such document, it got pretty tedious. BBEdit is also extremely useful with its find and replace functions. Those of you familiar with shell scripting will be delighted to know that it also supports grep patterns and allows you to add your own custom patterns to the list it already has waiting for you. This function alone has saved me a solid couple months' worth of manual editing. Version 6 adds support for XHTML, ftp access using the Apple KeyChain, multiple clipboards (VERY cool), multi-byte text, and now features developer-extensible source code recognition capabilities. I'd just like to know how to have my colors back to the way they used to go. See, the thing is, now the colors are split down further, so not only are things like anchor tags and image tags colored their own way, but tag components "Attribute Names" and "Attribute Values" are colored similarly, no matter what sort of basic tag they're in. So both my red anchor tags and my green image tags contain purple "Names" and orange "Values" making them less obvious and therefore useful to me. This is illustrated below: <p><a name="bbedit"></a><img src="images/whitebullet.gif" width="20" height="21" border="0" align="left"> Previous versions of BBEdit looked like this: <p><a name="bbedit"></a><img src="http://www.gaussoin.com/images/whitebullet.gif" width="20" height="21" border="0" align="left"> I think that perhaps if Bare Bones took this tag sub-coloring one step further, I'd be delighted. I think that I'd use different hues of the same colors for the different components within the tag, thus giving me two levels of recognition advantage. Ah well, something to chew on for version 6.5. Bottom Line: BBEdit is a must for any Mac user who deals with text regularly. Whether you use it for HTML, scripting languages, C or Java based development languages, or simply ripping open any file to poke at the text inside, BBEdit is the best and most powerful tool out there--certainly for Mac OS, and it likely contends with the best text apps other platforms have to offer as well. If you've handicapped yourself by solely using a WYSIWYG editor, pick this up and see what's going on under the hood. Chances are your design will improve quite a bit. BBEdit 6.0.1 |
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