Friday, October 4, 2019

BBEdit 13

Bare Bones Software (tweet):

The “Pattern Playground” window provides an interactive interface for experimenting with the behavior of Grep patterns (regular expressions). This makes the process of creating complicated patterns much less trial-and-error, since you can see exactly what will match, and how, before committing to any irreversible actions.

A complete description of the pattern playground is in the Pattern Playground Notes.

This is really great.

Added the Grep Cheat Sheet. […] The button pops up a menu which provides some common Grep pattern idioms and brief descriptions; choosing one will insert it literally into the pattern and select it (replacing anything that has been selected).

As is this.

BBEdit allows you to make rectangular selections in documents for which “Soft Wrap Text” is turned on.

A longstanding limitation addressed.

When editing the search string in the Find window, any matches for it will highlight in the “target” document window[…] This allows basic previewing of the effects of a Find All or Replace All operation.

What did I ever do without this?

There are two new commands on the “Select” submenu of the Edit menu[…]

Live Search Results: selects matches found while searching using the Live Search feature.

The trick to using this is that before you can do anything with the multiple selection you need to click the Done button or press Esc to go back to editing mode. I haven’t quite figured out yet when working with the selection is better than using the Find window (since it’s also live now).

The Python language module gets a built-in set of tags, for the core Python symbols.

This is kind of a regression for me because it highlights a bunch of commonly used words when I’m only using them as argument names or local variables. However, it was easy to turn it off by creating a language-specific color scheme that colors the “ctags symbols” the same as regular text.

Added a new command to the Text menu: “Apply Transform”. This command provides an “express” way to apply a single text transformation to specific files or folders, without requiring the explicit creation of a Text Factory.

I like this because, in recent versions, the “Convert to ASCII” command has only been available via a text factory.

The Text Colors preferences are now easier to use for selecting and editing color schemes. A central concept is that there is now always a color scheme in effect. It can be a factory color scheme, one you’ve downloaded, or one you’ve created. The previous “Custom Settings” indication no longer appears.

[…]

If you have a color scheme selected, any changes you make to settings in the Text Colors preferences will change the color scheme file on disk.

This was kind of confusing before and is much more intuitive now.

Andrew Madsen:

BareBones continues to set the standard for detailed change logs.

Jeff Johnson:

Has @siegel ever considered trolling everyone with a “Bug fixes and performance improvements” update? Maybe on April 1.

Rich Siegel:

That’s kinda what we have to do in the app store, because there’s not enough space or formatting support to render the full change notes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Jason Snell:

BBEdit 13.0’s paid version costs $50, and users from previous paid versions can upgrade for $30 (from the previous version) or $40 (from older versions). The last paid update to BBEdit was two years ago, and the previous one to that was five years ago. Users of BBEdit on the Mac App Store won’t have to pay to get the update; on the Mac App Store, BBEdit’s premium features are a subscription for $40/year or $4/month and get access to all updates forever.

Ryan Dotson:

It’s been my companion for over twenty years. I’ve never seriously considered any alternative – BBEdit doesn’t let me down, and is never anything short of helpful.

[…]

My favourite enhancement is to the editor’s status bars – a large text option. My eyes are still good enough to see the normal size but the large version is just a bit more comfortable to read. Importantly, though the widgets are larger, they don’t feel it.

Peter Hosey:

It says a lot about my trust in @BBEdit —and my lack of it in almost all other software—to not move my cheese or otherwise fuck things up that I saw this and was immediately excited to update.

It really doesn’t suck. And I trust its developers to keep it that way.

Previously:

Update (2019-10-17): Adam Engst:

Even for someone like me who has been writing regular expressions for years, building a grep search usually requires trial and error. That’s not because I’m lousy at grep, but because it’s easy to assume a source file is more regular than it actually is.

Ryan Dotson:

BBStylish is a stylesheet for BBEdit’s Preview window that offers attractive defaults, but which can be customised with little to no knowledge of CSS.

3 Comments RSS · Twitter

I'd almost be willing to pay for BBEdit for the release notes alone!

The release notes of VS Code are great as well, with nice animations.

Forgot to paste the URL for the VS Code release notes... https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/
Worth a look.

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