HTML Editor Reviews | Reviews and Discussion of (X)HTML Coding Tools

Review: BBEdit 8.5

Bare Bones Software has just released an update of the venerable BBEdit that improves on the earlier 8.2.5 (review) with some great new features. While BBEdit is still both more and less of a tool than I need, I really like the changes Bare Bones has made, including the $74 USD price drop. Some of my praise and complaints remain from the last version, so I won’t repeat myself here. Rather, I’ll share impressions of this new version and add a few things I forgot to mention last time around.

What I Like

• BBEdit now has code folding.
• Now, when you choose to “soft wrap” a document, the wrapping respects your indentation. I love this feature (which can also be found in Quanta+ for Linux)!
• I missed this last time, so I’ll mention it here: The BBEdit user manual dedicates a good 20 pages or so to GREP and regular expressions, including examples — awesome for someone (like me) new to regex.
• BBEdit allows for column/rectangular text selection.
• Clippings (formerly Glossaries) which are advanced snippets, including replacement tokens and script support.
• Bare Bones has made some GUI improvements, including enlarging the toolbar icons. Certainly an improvement over the previous version.
• The preferences panel (which contains an overwhelming number of options) is now searchable.
• The Balance function allows you to match tags, brackets, etc.
• You can view tab stops (faint lines that show you where tabs will be).
• BBEdit has a multi-item clipboard — handy if you don’t have something like iClip.
• 8.5 is actually snappier on my Mac Mini than 8.2.5, and it certainly loads faster.
• There’s a new logo, which improves on the previous iteration considerably (was that Comic Sans in the old one?).
• Bare Bone dropped the price of BBEdit by 37% to $125 USD. That seems quite a bit more reasonable.

Gripes

• Get the manual out, because creating advanced clippings isn’t the most intuitive thing in the world.
• As I said about GoLive!, I don’t like using palettes for HTML/CSS creation. Give me code hinting and code completion any day of the week.
• Tabs still get wrapped in the text when applying tags using the Markup menu.

Wishlist

• Traditional code hinting/completion.
• Column editing.

Overall

I’m really happy with the changes Bare Bones has made to their top editor, and I think current users will enjoy them as well. For HTML/CSS editing, I’m still not sure I’d recommend BBEdit, but if you want a multipurpose text editor and you don’t fancy TextMate, then I’d definitely take BBEdit 8.5 for a spin.

10 Comments

1. One word, TextMate. It’s cheaper and better. I used BBEdit for years and then converted to TextMate. It was just like going from Windows to Mac — there was no going back. Plus, TextMate has some very cool 3rd party “bundle” support, like the ability to post and retrieve code snippets from Snipplr.

   Comment by Jon Henshaw — September 21, 2006 @ 8:48 am

2. Jon: I do still prefer TextMate (review) to BBEdit, but 8.5 is a very nice upgrade overall. On a sidenote, one of the things that makes TextMate so great is that Macromates posts screencasts of TextMate in action, which aim both to wow you and teach you how to use the software. I don’t think it would hurt BBEdit (or any software manufacturer) to follow suit. Thanks for the comment.

   Comment by Eric — September 21, 2006 @ 8:59 am

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