∞ Bare Bones releases BBEdit 9.5

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Is there really a better application on the Mac than BBEdit? It’s an app that I’ve been using everyday for the better part of 15 years and on Tuesday it received a major update with the release of version 9.5.

As usual with an update from Bare Bones, BBEdit 9.5 contains a lot of new features. Topping the list is a Live Search bar. As the name suggests, Live Search begins returning matches for the search as soon as you start typing.

The search strings are also highlighted in the window’s editing view, so you can immediately see them in your document. The company also added the ability to hit Return and Shift-Return to go forward and backward through the results.

BBEdit 9.5 now allows you to attach scripts to certain application and document events, according to notes provided with the update.

The BBEdit 9.5 update is free for all users of 9.0 or higher. For new users the application costs $125. Upgrades from previous versions are $30.


  • http://twitter.com/chipotlecoyote @chipotlecoyote

    Hmm. You know, I keep trying to go back to BBEdit from TextMate and keep getting stymied by BBEdit's refusal to add just a couple features I've come to think of as standard — not only TM but Emacs and Vim have had them for years. One of them is "smart" indenting, which is distinct from auto-indenting; smart-indenting editors will increase or decrease the indent of the new line after you hit [return] based on the last line, i.e., automatically indent one step after a line that ends with a ":" in Python or a "{" in a C-like language. This sounds like a trivial thing you wouldn't miss, but it's one of those things that ends up saving you a surprising amount of time once you get used to it. A good smart indenting algorithm can handle HTML, too; combine that with automatically adding closing tags and you can cut down on the amount of typing in creating an HTML file dramatically.

    The real dealbreaker, though, is that the [backspace] key doesn't work intelligently in files that auto-expand tabs. If you're typing Python source, you hit [tab] once to indent for a block, then at the end of the block in *every other editor I use* you can just hit [backspace] to go back one indent. But in BBEdit, you need to hit [backspace] four times (or however many times you've indented the text). At this point I suspect BareBones has a philosophical objection to doing this the way everybody else does, but at least for me it makes the program virtually unusable for Python.

    Even so, I used to love BBEdit, and every time a new version comes out I try it, hopefully. And end up a bit regretfully going back to TextMate. Maybe BBEdit 10.0 . . .