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BBEdit from Bare Bones Software has long been one of the leading text editing and manipulation applications for the Mac. First released in the early 90s, BBEdit has remained a sought-after tool for software developers, writers, web developers, content developers, and anyone else who has a need to create, format, clean up, or edit any type of text.
Pros
- Extensive text handling capabilities
- Supports markup languages, including HTML 5, HTML 4, XHTML 1, and XHTML 1.1
- Syntax support for over 30 different languages including Ruby, Perl, Python, Objective C, SQL, and Fortran
- Tag balancing and attribute editing to ease HTML writing
- Can add HTML elements from tool palettes
- Code folding
- Automatic highlighting
- Browser preview
- Auto-save
- Can edit remote files using various file transfer protocols
- Extensive grep capabilities
- Handles multiple types of line endings used by DOS, Mac, and Unix
Cons
- Steep learning curve for advanced features
I've used BBEdit for years for text manipulation, remote file editing, and editing system files that require elevated user levels. Sure, I could change file permissions, edit the files, and then change the permissions back to what they need to be. But BBEdit lets me perform that task automatically from within the app, a real timesaver.
BBEdit is a do-everything text editor that has quite the following among programmers, web developers, system integrators, IT professionals, and authors who need text manipulation tools beyond what is found in word processing applications that are designed to make words look pretty on paper.
With version 11, BBEdit has gained some impressive improvements, a pretty difficult task for an app that has been around for so long.
The Find Differences feature has been reworked to provide a single-window presentation that actually works quite well for finding the differences between two documents. Finding differences isn't limited to two files; you can compare folder contents as well, to ensure folders are in sync, and if not, what the differences are.
Clippings, snippets of text you wish to reuse, are now more flexible, and can be used on all documents or limited to documents that use specific languages. This lets you keep your HTML clippings from cluttering up other languages.
Text Factories are just that, little factories made from linked commands from BBEdit's arsenal of tools. Text Factories can be applied to the current document, or to a set of files that you choose. Text Factories can be as simple as a find-and-replace command you can use to change a name in a selection of documents, or as complex as you need, by stringing together multiple commands.
If you work with text, in any form, and need a state-of-the-art text editor, BBEdit will always deserve a look.
BBedit 11 is $49.99. A 30-day demo is available.
See other software choices from Tom's Mac Software Picks.
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