BBEdit 8.0: Evolutionary

Many of you may be familiar with the uber text editor, BBEdit. I recently upgraded to the 8.0 version of this fine utility.

My verdict? Well, it’s pretty similar to 7.0. There are a few key new things that made it worth the upgrade price to me. The first is the document sidebar. Instead of having a few dozen windows open, you can have just one and switch between them. This is a big win for small screen users (like those of us with 12″ Powerbooks). It also highlights the current line, which seems minor, but is amazingly useful. Hunting down the cursor can be a real chore, so this is a real time-saver. It also lets you the system spell-checker (which I’ve become addicted to.

Unix buffs will also like the improved “bbedit” command (which lets you pipe text into it). Also very useful is the new “bbdiff” command, which lets you compare two files from the terminal with BBEdit. Cool!

There are other features which aren’t quite as important to me, but may be of interest to some. So check it out! You may find it’s worth the $49 upgrade fee.