BBEdit 13

BBEdit 13

 

 

BBEdit is the leading professional HTML and text editor for Mac OS. This award-winning product has been crafted to serve the needs of writers, Web authors and software developers, and provides an abundance of features for editing, searching, and manipulation of prose, source code,
and textual data.

 

BBEdit offers a 30-day evaluation period. During that period, all of BBEdit’s features are available. 

 

BBEdit Product Tour

 

Exercise Total Control Over Text

• use BBEdit’s legendary text processing power in any Automator Workflow
• create, edit, format or clean up any kind of text, anywhere
• use BBEdit’s numerous built-in functions for converting, sorting, searching and replacing text
• locate and manipulate large volumes of text in small amounts of time with powerful text searching, including regular-expression matching and multi-file searching with file filtering
• make short work of repetitive text-processing tasks, without scripting or programming, with Text Factories. Quickly and easily build a series of transformations and apply them to any number of documents

 

Text Factories increase your productivity by making it possible to quickly and easily apply as many of BBEdit’s powerful arsenal of tools as you need to achieve your goals across multiple files and folders, with just the single initial setup required. As a bonus, text factories operate in the background, allowing you to use BBEdit for other work while they’re running, and take full advantage of machines with multiple processors.

 

BBEdit features an array of powerful text transformations. Until now, there has been no easy way to apply more than one of these transformations at a time, nor to any documents other than the one in the front editing window. BBEdit introduces the Text Factory, which allows you to assemble a list of text transformations that will be applied in order to either the current document or selection (when invoked as a filter), or to a specified list of files and folders (when invoked via the Scripts menu). A Text Factory can also run AppleScript and Unix scripts against each file, further enhancing the power and flexibility of this feature.

 

 

BBEdit at Work Searching Text

 

 

Support for multiple search and replace locations means that operations across multiple folders (such as multiple web sites) can now be performed in a single step; this significantly enhances productivity without requiring scripting or manual intervention. Since the application runs multi-file search/replace in the background, productivity is again improved. As a bonus, the multi-file search and replace engine takes advantage of multiple processors (on machines that have them) for even greater performance.

 

 

Work Your Way

• dive right in because BBEdit works exactly as you expect it to with all the Mac behavior you depend on, from keyboard shortcuts to support for the latest Mac technologies such as Bonjour
• customize Menu keys (keyboard shortcuts)
• create your own functions for BBEdit using your favorite scripting language with comprehensive AppleScript, Automator, Perl and Unix Shell support
• you can even modify the behavior of the built-in menus using AppleScript because BBEdit is attachable
• text completion speeds input and ensures correctness; create Clippings for ready access to frequently used items and custom tags; with menu-driven and key-bindable item selection; language-sensitive Clipping sets
• create your own syntax coloring without programming
• use BBEdit with the Mac OS Terminal

 

Example: customizing a Menu command

“Set Menu Keys” in the Preferences window is where the action is.

 

 

Using a clipping to speed PHP coding

Text completion, both built-in and customizable using clippings and ctags data, is an integral part of BBEdit’s editing workflow:

 

 

Codeless Language Modules

Codeless language modules make it much easier to extend BBEdit’s built-in syntax coloring and function navigation. The basic syntax and coloring rules for programming languages can be represented by a relatively simple text file, without requiring programming or advanced logic.

 

Terminal Integration

Invoke BBEdit from the command line and pass the results to a document. For example, the ps (process status) command can generate some extremely long lines. Here, we are telling ps to give complete details and to put the result into a new document and to scroll the window to the top of the document. (The document behind the Terminal window is a BBEdit document.)

 

 

Command Files, Folders, Disks, and Servers

• use Disk Browsers and FTP Browsers to view and open files on local and remote volumes
• edit files in Disk Browsers, Multi-File Search Results windows, Project windows. Even edit a single file in multiple windows!

 

 

 

• create BBEdit Projects to group and edit related files in a single window, no matter their location on disk
• create and edit files directly on FTP and SFTP servers with built-in Open from FTP/SFTP Server and Save to FTP/SFTP Server commands; or use Interarchy, Fetch, Transmit, or any other file transfer client with “Edit in BBEdit” support
• Open File by Name gives quick access to items in your BBEdit project (or Xcode project).

 

 

FTP/SFTP browsers

BBEdit offers the ability to work with files on FTP and SFTP servers as easily as if they were part of your local file system.

 

 

Organize your projects

You can also add files from anywhere (on disk, or from FTP/SFTP) to a BBEdit Project (and save the Project for reuse). While the Disk Browser and FTP/SFTP Browser windows show you the structure of your volumes, BBEdit Projects let you easily access related files without them having to be located together.

 

 

Command-line tools

BBEdit features extensive integration with the Unix command line, via a collection of powerful tools. These are included with the application:

• The BBEdit command-line tool lets you open FTP and SFTP URLs from the command line, and behaves consistently with other Unix tools by allowing you to create files on the fly, as well as by accepting input piped from other Unix commands. (Try “ls -la | bbedit”, for example.)
• bbdiff provides a command-line interface to “Find Differences”; it’s very useful when used as a command-line diff helper for SCM systems such as Subversion or Git.
• Use bbfind to run multi-file searches from the command line, and return the results for additional processing.
• The bbresults tool parses file/line output from other Unix commands in order to generate browseable GUI results windows so that you can easily navigate warnings and errors (for example, from compiler output).

 

Enjoy Textual Omnipotence

• tell at a glance what’s going on with customizable syntax coloring for over 20 languages and display of invisible characters, tab stops and current line highlighting
• navigate within your documents easily with the Function Popup, custom place markers, and support for exuberant ctags indexing
• see the structure of your code using automatic indent, line numbering and code folding
• easily navigate among multiple documents in a single window
• document and selection statistics (character, word and line count) shown at the bottom of every window

 

BBEdit makes it easy to navigate through even the most complicated code, with automatic function detection, code folding, optional line and cursor position display, function menu, syntax coloring, invisible character display, and more.

 

BBEdit features a visual Page Guide (the darker area on the right side of the window), tab stop indicators (vertical lines) and current line highlighting (the line with the insertion point is highlighted with the color of your choice; here it’s gray).

 

 

 

Multiple document display and navigation

Collect and organize all HTML source files for a particular Web site task or all the source files for a programming or scripting job into a single window. Reduce screen clutter by consolidating many documents into a few windows.

 

You can also organize all related files into Projects, and save the Project file for reuse. Projects can even include files opened via FTP/SFTP.

 

Every editing window provides a user interface for opening multiple text documents into a single window, and then switching between them quickly and easily (by clicking on a document in the list, using a keyboard command, or using the controls in the Navigation Bar). You can drag text files in to a window’s file list, or between the file lists of two different windows.

 

 

Universal Ctags Support

Universal Ctags is a powerful tool for indexing and navigating source code written in C, C++, JavaScript and many other languages. BBEdit integrates with Universal Ctags by automatically locating Ctags index files and providing easy access to indexed symbols by means of contextual menus and the “Find Definition” command.

 

Universal Ctags support makes it very easy to get around in your source code without leaving the comfortable and productive BBEdit environment.

 

Live Up To Standards

• reduce coding errors with BBEdit’s automated HTML and CSS markup tools (including support for HTML5)
• ensure standards compliance and proper code structure (for entire sites, whole pages, page fragments and generated code) using BBEdit’s built-in HTML syntax checking
• preview your site right in BBEdit even if it uses PHP, JSP, or other server-side processing methods
• use the Mac OS spelling checker to catch those embarrassing mistakes before the rest of the world sees them

 

BBEdit makes it easy to get it right the first time with its automated HTML and CSS tools.

The markup panel is driven by the same information that informs BBEdit’s markup syntax checker, so that it shows you tags, attributes, and attribute values that are appropriate for the point in your document in which you’re editing.

 

 

Find errors in your code early and fix them easily with BBEdit’s HTML Syntax checker.

You can verify the correctness of your code even in partial documents, in documents with generated content, even in documents using server-side includes! You can also mark portions of documents to skip when checking syntax.

 

The HTML syntax checker makes it easier to verify syntactic correctness in HTML/XHTML source files that contain embedded scripts (for example, embedded Perl or PHP), as well as in source files that are not complete HTML/XHTML documents (such as those that will be merged with page template files).

 

 

Preview your pages right in BBEdit

The “Preview in BBEdit” command uses WebKit (the same engine that powers Safari, Google Chrome, and other popular web browsers) to preview your code. The preview window updates your window as you edit, without requiring you to save, reload, or switch applications. If you wish, you may use any available Web browser for previewing as well. New BBEdit preview windows now include access to the powerful WebKit Inspector, so that you can inspect the runtime behavior of your page, debug JavaScript on the fly, and more.

Integrate Smoothly Into Existing Workflows

• use BBEdit’s legendary text processing power in any Automator Workflow
• manage code revisions and access with integrated Source Control Management, including support for Subversion and Git
• utilize advanced Unix scripting on Mac OS with built-in Perl, Python, Ruby, and shell scripting support
• transparently reads and writes DOS/Windows, Unix, and Unicode (UTF-8 and UTF-16) text files for maximum cross-platform compatibility
• invoke BBEdit’s Find Differences from the command-line and from within your favorite Source Control Management system with bbdiff
• Run multi-file searches from the command line with bbfind
• use Shell Worksheets to combine the power of BBEdit with the power of the shell

 

Automator Support

BBEdit includes a set of Automator actions that mirrors its internal text transformations; most of what is on the Text menu is available to Automator, as well as a “Replace All” action for search and replace; and a few supporting actions to smooth the process of getting text into and out of open BBEdit documents. No scripting required!

 

 

Enhanced SCM support

Direct integration with Git and Subversion: BBEdit’s Git and Subversion menus include all of the commands that you need for common operations. In addition, when committing from within BBEdit, a handy submission form makes it easy to write commit comments.

 

 

Finally, the built-in support for version control systems uses BBEdit’s editing environment for writing the comments included when committing changed files.

 

bbdiff

The bbdiff command-line tool allows you to invoke BBEdit’s powerful “Find Differences” command from the Unix command line. You can even configure Subversion, Perforce, and Git to use BBEdit to view the differences between file revisions.

 

bbresults

Many Unix tools and scripts generate output that references specific file and line positions (for example, compile errors). The bbresults command-line tool allows you to present this output in a easy-to-navigate GUI results window within BBEdit.

 

Shell Worksheets

BBEdit’s Shell Worksheets are much more than a terminal — they’re the best of both the shell and BBEdit! Enter and run Unix commands from within BBEdit, while applying BBEdit’s editing power to prepare commands, or slice & dice the output. Take advantage of the application’s central Unix Worksheet to keep it all in one place, if you like; or create your own worksheet documents. Every BBEdit project carries its own worksheet as well, for added convenience.

 

 

What's new in BBEdit 13?

 

Pattern Playgrounds - 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.

Grep Cheat Sheet - The Grep Cheat Sheet provides quick access to many common regular expression idioms as well as brief descriptions. It's great not only for learning how to write regular expression ("grep") patterns, but also for experienced Grep users. The Cheat Sheet is available in places where you commonly write Grep patterns: the Find, Multi-File Search, and Pattern Playground windows; as well as in the "Process Lines Containing", "Process Duplicates", and "Sort Lines" dialog boxes.

 

Improved Dark Mode support and appearance switching - BBEdit 13 can automatically follow the system appearance (works great with Mac OS Catalina's automatic Dark Mode switching), or you can have BBEdit's appearance always be dark (or light). Set separate color schemes for each appearance mode, and they change automatically!

 

 

Live searching from the Find window - As you edit your search string and options in the Find window, BBEdit will automatically highlight matches in the editing window right behind.

 

Apply Text Transform - Use this command to quickly apply any transformation from the Text menu to multiple files or folders.

 

 

The "Commands" Command - This was added in BBEdit 12.5, but it's too cool not to mention it again here. This panel gives you quick keyboard access to any available menu command in BBEdit. Use a handy keyboard equivalent (Command-Shift-U, or set your own) and get a panel showing every available menu command. Type a few characters and quickly get down to the menu command, recent file, clipping, script or text filter you're looking for. Hit Enter or return, and you're off to the races.