Information for Developers

This page provides information for developers who wish to:

• provide an “Edit in BBEdit” command in their application;
• implement a language module to support syntax coloring and/or function navigation for a source code language not presently supported by BBEdit

Edit in BBEdit

In order to facilitate the use of BBEdit as an external editor for various applications, we have devised (with the assistance of UserLand Software , the “ODB Editor Suite” (so called because its original purpose was to provide for editing text objects in the Frontier Object Database, or ODB).

The ODB Editor Suite is a proprietary standard, but documentation is now publicly available for those who wish to implement an “Edit in BBEdit” command in their application. (Many file transfer clients, such as Fetch and Interarchy, currently support the ODB editor suite, but its utility is by no means limited to those sorts of applications.)

Learn how to implement an Edit in BBEdit command in your application.

Language Modules

If you are a language designer (or fan!) and would like BBEdit customers to be able to utilize BBEdit’s syntax coloring, language-aware folding, function navigation, and completion services while editing source files written in your language, we encourage you to include a language module with your product.

The simplest path is to write a codeless language module. Reference information for doing so is available here.

Language module development information is available in the BBEdit SDK, which may be downloaded here.