Bare Bones Software, Inc.

With BBEdit, you can...

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 Rendezvous
• customize Menu keys (keyboard shortcuts)
• create your own functions for BBEdit using your favorite scripting language with comprehensive AppleScript , PERL, and Unix Shell support
• you can even modify the behavior of the built-in menus using AppleScript because BBEdit is “attachable”
• store and insert frequently-used text items and custom tags with the Powerful Glossary; with menu-driven and key-bindable item selection; language-sensitive sets (sample C Source, HTML, Property List, RSS, WML, and XSLT Glossaries supplied)
• create your own syntax coloring without programming New!
• customize palette layout by task New!
• use BBEdit with the Mac OS X Terminal Improved!

Customizing a Menu command

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Wrapping a selection with “Curly Quotes” using a Glossary Entry (top)

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Codeless Language Modules (top)

Codeless language modules offer readily extensible syntax coloring support. Previously, enhancing BBEdit’s built-in syntax coloring and function navigation has required the use of a compiler to write code. Beginning with BBEdit 8, the basic syntax and coloring rules for programming languages can be represented by a text file which can be readily written with a variety of tools (including BBEdit itself). This makes it possible for non-programmers (and much less work for everyone else) to extend BBEdit’s language support to include languages for which support is not included in the basic BBEdit package.

BBEdit 8 introduces a text-file format for describing a programming language’s basic structure (including the format of strings and comments, basic function-navigation structure, and keyword list). These so-called “Codeless Language Modules” supplement BBEdit’s existing plug-in architecture for extending syntax coloring and function navigation.

Terminal Integration (top)

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 which is “clean” (i.e., will not ask to be saved when closing) and to show it at the top of the document. The document behind the Terminal window is a BBEdit document.

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Workspace (top)

Create different workspaces for, say, working on a web site versus writing software. The Workspace commands allow you to save and restore the arrangement of your palettes (as listed on the Palettes submenu).