[Macworld]

Post your comments for Review: BBEdit 9.02 here

[ronincali3002]

I love BBEdit for balancing code, GREP/Regular Expressions searches HTML code edits in times when Dreamweaver won't do, and the tight integration it has with Dreamweaver.
The lack of great CSS support is irrelevant in my opinion for people like me who SWEAR by CSSEdit. I'd easily have paid triple what CSSEdit cost, so I don't miss any such support in BBEdit.

[maflynn]

I'm curious to see how this stacks up with textmate.
I've been a light user of textmate but given the fact it has not been updated in a long time (version 2 was promised 2 years ago) I'm rethinking my decision.

[technolawyer]

One important flaw in BBEdit since version 6 is the way it breaks lines. Before version 6, it would only break lines at spaces -- critically important for those that publish plain text email newsletters because it would preserve long URLs that extend past your character limit per line.
Beginning with version 6, BBEdit breaks lines at characters like ? and / which often appear in long URLs, thus breaking the URLs in a plain text newsletter. This presented us with a big problem when we migrated to OS X.
The solution? For a while, we ran BBEdit 5 in Classic. Then, before he became a media mogul, we hired John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame to write an AppleScript called Classic Line Breaks. It breaks lines only at spaces just like BBEdit 5 and earlier.
If there's any interest in this script, please post a message here. If several people post, I'll upload it to MacUpdate as a free download. If there's no interest, I'll assume we're the only company that needs to break lines at spaces.
Other than that, we love BBEdit and use it every day (for HTML too). However, I think we'll stick with version 8.x for now.

[sporobolus]

i suppose this is an important flaw to you but it's probably only a slightly interesting feature niggle to most of us; i never noticed the problem, though i often use BBEdit to format email (i am a die-hard plain-text email user); that's probably because i don't think it's proper to hard wrap plain-text email -- format=flowed has been around for a long time and works great in most email clients

on the whole, i think this is just a good example of BBEdit's extensibility

[technolawyer]

sporobolus, sorry for not explaining more clearly. Commercial email newsletters differ from regular email use. Apple Mail, Entourage, etc. will add line breaks, but commercial publishers don't use clients like these to send out email newsletters to thousands of people. We use our own software, which purposely does not insert line breaks. This allows us to have complete control over line breaks using BBEdit (we break at 60 characters) prior to insertion into our software.

Regarding your assertion that it's not necessary you're wrong. As I noted, every email client adds line breaks. Why? Because some older email servers choke on long strings of characters and will reject email without line breaks.

[sporobolus]

we are veering from the topic of BBEdit, but to be clear, yes, format=flowed implies that line-breaks are added, but it should be done behind the scenes by the sending software, whether that is an email client or some sort of bulk tool; and proper email clients then in effect remove the line breaks on receipt for display; too bad your tool cannot automate format=flowed handling, because the spec for format=flowed also allows reconstruction of line-broken URLs when they are (as they always should be in plain-text email) enclosed in angle brackets[1]; (props to you, though, for trying to do the right thing)

to bring it back on topic, it shouldn't be too hard to write a script to help BBEdit produce proper format=flowed construction for use with email tools that can't generate it themselves; i wouldn't expect BBEdit to do this out of the box

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2646.txt

[PadreCohen]

This review states that BBEdit 9.x requires OS 10.5.2 or later, but Bare Bones says Mac OS X 10.4 or later. Who's right?

[sporobolus]

i run it on 10.4.11, and that is consistent with the BareBones site, which says 10.4 or later

[bigcloits]

After years of hand-rolling scads of HTML and CSS and PHP, I long to move into Coda’s slick-looking UI and enjoy some of its obviously great features ... but, “unfortunately,” BBEdit still totally kicks Coda’s butt. There is a long, long list of things that BBEdit can do for me that Coda can not, and that was before v9.
One example: Coda has a very pretty-looking way of balancing, highlight a matching brace (or any other paired punctuation mark) with a little animated bulls-eye-ish thingamy. Very nice. And if the matching item happens to be out of the window? Too bad! You can’t see it. BBEdit’s equivalent — simply highlighting the balanced content, d’oh — is less flashy but way more useful.
And BBEdit’s completion and clippings features pack a huge punch. There’s basically nothing I can’t do with them. Coda has its equivalent, but it’s no more than a cute toy by comparison.

[maflynn]

I took the plunge and plunked down some $$ and purchased BBEdit. i was using textmate but that hasn't been updated in ages and I was tempted to buy coda but I use the text editor for many functions not just web development so I wanted a multitasker not a unitasker to steal Alton Brown's phrase :)