TeX/LaTeX support has changed: inline math formulas are no longer colored differently from the main text. Java support is still lacking: the current function display at the bottom of the window now correctly shows which class the insertion point is inside of, but it does not show the current function, and the function popup is still oblivious to inner class methods. Perl syntax coloring works better now, faithfully coloring here-doc comments, although it still gets confused by function definitions inside string literals. The function popup now indicates the current function in bold, in addition to putting a bullet next to it. The Balance command, which finds matching pairs of parentheses and brackets, is now aware of comments and strings. There are also changes to support for non-HTML languages. The normal “Tool” plug-ins have been a success, and I’m optimistic that language modules will be too. That aside, however, it’s always great to see Bare Bones add extensibility to the product. Also, it’s not clear whether user-written language modules for HTML-like languages will be able to leverage BBEdit’s existing HTML scanner and tools, or whether they’ll need to start from scratch. Such users might have been better served by a less sophisticated user interface-based form of customization. The downside is that such customization is inaccessible to those without sufficient programming skills and time.
#BBEDIT 11 REVIEW PLUS#
On the plus side, this feature will allow users to write modules for radically different languages from Python to Scheme to Unix shell, or even to replace one of the built-in language modules.
#BBEDIT 11 REVIEW SOFTWARE#
With a forthcoming software development kit, C-programming end users will be able to write their own language modules that tailor syntax coloring and the function-popup to their needs.
Many users had hoped for a feature that let them add custom tags or language keywords for BBEdit to color, but Bare Bones chose a more ambitious approach: language modules. The answer seems to be customization at the user level. Of course, there are a lot of languages out there, and Bare Bones does not have the resources to support all of them. I like BBEdit’s “ring” approach to multiple clipboards much better than the “numbered clipboard” approach that Copy Paste and Nisus Writer use, because I find it easier to remember relative positions of items than arbitrary numbers for them. In other words, BBEdit maintains a ring of six clipboards which you can rotate left or right, much like Switcher (the original way to change between running applications on the Mac) or Emacs’s Kill Ring. There’s also a Next Clipboard command to cycle in the opposite direction. The sixth time you use Previous Clipboard, you end up back at the most recent clipboard. The difference is that when you Cut or Copy, the clipboard’s previous contents are not lost: you can get them back by using the Previous Clipboard command, and you can do this five times.
If you only want to use one clipboard, you don’t need to do anything differently. Unlike Mailsmith, BBEdit does not color text to indicate the levels of quoting.īBEdit now has multiple clipboards, which it preserves across launches. It’s like a quote-savvy version of the Hard Wrap command, so it also supports indenting and reverse indenting, optionally relative to the first line. The Rewrap command reflows quoted text, wrapping all the lines to the same length. You can increase or decrease the level of quoting, or remove all the quotes entirely. Mailsmith’s commands for manipulating quoted e-mail text are now built into BBEdit.
#BBEDIT 11 REVIEW WINDOWS#
Files can contain text in a mix of different scripts, but BBEdit windows are still limited to a single font at a time, so you’ll have to flip back and forth between fonts using the new Font menu. Multi-byte support is pervasive: it works in BBEdit’s text manipulation dialogs as well as with the HTML tools. (Right-to-left scripts such as Arabic are not supported.) It can open and save files in Unicode using the UTF-16 (big-endian or little-endian) and UTF-8 formats. BBEdit now supports multi-byte text in scripts from Japanese to Cyrillic to Ethiopic.