BBEdit 15.5
Introducing “workspaces”, a way to switch between arrangements of open documents and windows. A workspace includes the same application state that is saved and restored across quit and relaunch, but can be activated at any time while the application is running. This is useful for (for example) switching between working setups for different clients, or for different types of projects (writing vs programming vs web development).
I love the idea of workspaces, and the implementation seems to work well, but I’m not a frequent user of them. Most of my work in BBEdit is through projects, which already remember collections of related documents. I could use workspaces to remember combinations of open projects, but I prefer to use LaunchBar to quickly open them in a more freeform manner.
Workspaces do not remember state within a project, so I continue to use collections for quick access to key project files, and I close projects with the documents I’m working on still open so that the project remembers them the next time I open it.
The main use I’ve found for workspaces is when I’m doing some ad hoc work with a random collection of files and I need to pause that and temporarily switch gears to do something else. I can save the current state as a temporary workspace, clear everything away, do some urgent work in a project, and then restore what I was doing. This is also how I use Safari tab groups. They’re not part of my day-to-day workflow, but they’re occasionally very handy.
If you aren’t so project-based, or if you like to have lots of windows open at the same time, I could see workspaces being a much bigger deal. As with BBEdit’s automatic state restoration at quit (or crash), workspaces can bring all the windows back and put them in the right places, but it can’t put them on the right space. Plea to Apple: we really need an API for Spaces so that apps can get and set a window’s space.
Added support for FTPS (FTP protocol run over TLS).
My servers all support SFTP, so I haven’t needed this, but it’s good to have wider protocol support. I was recently reminded that BBEdit projects can be set to deploy to a server, generating Markdown and uploading changed files. I use rsync for automatically syncing big sites, but I may try this for some smaller ones where I had just been copying the files manually.
Added support for the “Writing Tools” feature introduced in macOS 15.2 as part of the Apple Intelligence suite.
I had no use for Writing Tools on its introduction because it was so hard to see what changes it had made. Having it integrated with BBEdit makes this easy because I can just accept the changes and then ask BBEdit to compare the file with the previous revision from Git or macOS’s version store. Unfortunately, I have yet to see Writing Tools make any useful suggestions.
Made changes to improve the experience when running #! or Unix language scripts that take a nontrivial amount of time to complete.
Using “Run” on a script window, or choosing a Unix script or executable from BBEdit’s Scripts menu will open a window with an icon you can click to get back to the document being run, a progress bar, an elapsed-time indicator, and a cancel button. These all work as you might expect.
Any output produced by the script will appear in the text area, and when the script execution has finished it will also be added to the appropriate log file. You can get to the log file using the button provided for the purpose.
This works much better than the old way of running scripts.
When the insertion point is inside of an opening delimiter, or immediately outside a closing delimiter, BBEdit will highlight the matching delimiter, as appropriate.
If the insertion point is immediately inside of a container element in an HTML document, delimiter matching will highlight the corresponding pair of opening and closing elements.
I think this is the sleeper feature in BBEdit 15.5. As with the other recent feature of underlining other occurrences of the current word, I was kind of skeptical at first, but left it enabled, and now I love it.
Added the ability to preview CSV and TSV files (explicit indicated language of “Comma-separated Values” and “Tab-separated Values”, respectively) using “Preview in BBEdit” or a designated web browser. “Export as HTML” works as well. Note that BBEdit is still not a spreadsheet.
[…]
New text transformation: “Strip Diacriticals”. This transform replaces composed diacritical forms in the text with the base character. Thus, “á” becomes “a”, “ç” becomes “c”, and so forth.
This is smarter than the old Convert to ASCII feature.
In Markdown documents, headings are now indented according to their level. H1 (“# this is an H1”) is not indented, H2 is indented by one space, etc. […] Additionally, blockquote sections (indicated with a ‘>‘) and list items “belong” to the heading section immediately before them, and act like nested documents.
This works with outline folding in the main document window and also in the function pop-up. Now that I’m using Markdown files for bug tracking, it’s great to have this sort of outliner functionality to manage increasingly larger files that contain my own notes and to do lists along with log excerpts and quoted text from customers, App Review, Radar, and DTS.
Reworked the internals of multi-file search/replace and Text Factory execution to improve performance and eliminate legacy API use. (The brevity of this description in no way reflects the amount of effort this required.)
Between the new threading and my Mac’s fast SSD, I can now search the entire current Mac SDK in Xcode (about 46K files) in about 4 seconds. Working with large documents is also faster now, and I rarely have to turn off soft wrapping for performance reasons these days.
BBEdit is still priced at $59.99 (or $4.99/month or $49.99/year via the Mac App Store), with a large number of free features.
See also: Jason Snell.
Previously:
- Grammarly vs. Apple’s Writing Tools
- BBEdit 15.1
- On the Undesign of Apple Intelligence Features
- Bug Tracking and Customer Support Tools
1 Comment RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I'm mostly using Zed as a text editor now; it just feels faster. However, when I have to make complex changes to a text file, BBEdit can't be beat. I'm glad it's still going. Probably one of the oldest Mac apps that has been in perpetual development.
