BBEdit 8.5

Fantastic update to the app I live in. Despite the only 0.24 jump in the version number, this seems to me to be a bigger update than either 7.0 or 8.0 was. 6.0 probably had more changes under the hood, but they weren’t as evident at the user level.

• Overall, the interface and preferences seem more polished and modern.
• Hierarchical disk browsers that can use BBEdit file filters. I keep two of these open at all times, now that the new layout makes better use of my screen space.
• Indented soft wrapping—at last.
• The Set Jump Mark command, which doesn’t seem to be listed in the official change notes, is very useful. I used to have to type XXX and then search for that to get back to where I was. Now, I don’t need that workaround.
• Camel case (a.k.a. studly) keyboard navigation is built-in, and (unlike my script) works when you have Shift held down to modify the selection.
• The navigation bar has been consolidated and is now keyboard navigable. I also like being able to see the current language and encoding in the status bar.
• Find in Reference works better with different languages.
• Text folding! This is occasionally very useful, but I only use it a few times per day. I’d probably use it more if it were possible to fold text from the keyboard (e.g. everything or the current function) without selecting it first.
• Support for -*- x-counterpart: file; -*- means I can flip back and forth between code and unit tests.
• Codeless language modules can now use regular expressions rather than just matching fixed text strings. This is a huge improvement, although they remain less powerful than TextMate’s language grammars.
• Language-specific editing and display preferences seem nice, though I haven’t had time to play around with them much yet.
• The searchable preferences window is genius. I’ve been using BBEdit for more than ten years, but even I don’t always remember which setting is on which pane. I love that you can see the names of the settings as you search, unlike with System Preferences. The consolidated “Menus” pane is also very nice.
• Document state is now tracked when files are moved—like it was in the old days of resource forks.
• The character-level difference highlighting is useful when comparing lines, but when looking for character rather than line differences I prefer my script that displays all the differences at once.
• Clippings are basically the same as glossary items (you can link to scripts but not embed them), but they’re much easier to create and use than before.
• As I write this, the online store doesn’t seem to be working, but if I understand correctly there’s now a single (non-academic) price—no more secret discount for upgrading from a free product. Good move.