BBEdit 12.1 – Powerful text and HTML editor.

February 7, 2018

BBEdit is the leading professional HTML and text editor for the Mac. Specifically crafted in response to the needs of Web authors and software developers, this award-winning product provides a plethora of features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text. BBEdit transforms text with high performance.

An intelligent interface provides easy access to BBEdit’s best of class features including grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages, FTP and SFTP open and save, AppleScript, Perl, and OS X Unix scripting support, glossary support, and a complete set of HTML tools.

What’s New

Version 12.1:

New

Beginning with this version, you can open documents that are much larger than was previously possible. In the Before Time, documents whose in-memory size (about twice the on-disk size) exceeded roughly 1.5GB would fail to open and report an out-of-memory error, as would documents whose internal structure required generation of large quantities of syntax coloring and/or code folding information (such as complicated XML documents).
Beginning with this version, you can perform many large-scale operations on very large files without running out of memory or needing to clear Undo state.
BBEdit is now built as a 64-bit application. This works around various reported bugs in the OS and has other beneficial side effects: the application starts more quickly on a "cold" launch; 64-bit color pickers and contextual-menu plug-ins are now available; and our customers are even more handsome and athletic than before.
Support for the Touch Bar has been added to various windows (applicable only to computers that have a Touch Bar, of course):
- FTP/SFTP browser windows: "go up", "go down" (into selected folder), and "reload".
- Text Factory windows: add/remove actions and run the factory.
- "Preview in BBEdit" windows: for items in the tool bar.
- Editing windows: toggle the sidebar and previous/next document navigation.
"Go To Line" (either the menu command or the popover from the cursor position display) supports the specification of line ranges, in addition to just a single line and column. For example, entering one of these forms into the field will behave as follows:
- X - moves the insertion point to the beginning of line X
- X:C - moves the insertion point to column C of line X
- X-Y - selects the text from the beginning of line X to the end of line Y (including the line break at the end of the line).
- X:C-Y - selects the text from column C on line X to the end of line Y(including the line break at the end of the line).
- X:C-Y:C2 - selects the text from column C on line X to column C2 on line Y.
"Preview in BBEdit" windows get a new item in their tool bar: "Open in Browser", which will preview the document's contents in the most recently used preview browser (or your system's default web browser, if applicable).
For language module developers: modules can now generate a new run kind (or use it as an available color for keywords): com.barebones.bblm.syntax-error. This is for use as its name suggests, in the case where the color scanner detects something incorrect while examining the document. The color preferences and built-in color schemes have been updated to include this.

Changed

When the "Match window appearance to selected editor color scheme" setting is turned on (as it is by default), BBEdit will use a light or dark (system-defined) appearance for the window title bar, appropriate to the color scheme. If you would prefer that BBEdit always use the system standard (light) appearance, set this preference:
defaults write com.barebones.bbedit AlwaysUseSystemAppearanceForTitleBar -bool YES
Made a change to significantly improve performance when soft-wrapping long documents to the window width. (The benefit is only available when a fixed-width font is in use.)
Removed "Show" from the "Scratchpad" and "Unix Worksheet" commands on the Window menu, because those are not toggles, and will always bring the appropriate window to the front.

Fixed

Fixed bug in which the Text-to-HTML entity conversion didn't honor the settings specified in the dialog box, and would always use named entities even when Decimal or Hex had been selected.
Fixed a bug in which fold ranges for XML files were not shown in cases where the XML schema used for the file contained a title container element which in turn contained a large quantity of text.
Fixed bug in which documents would leak the data associated with their display icon, which over time could lead to excessive memory consumption.
Fixed bug in which Control-Tab did not move the keyboard focus between panes of a split editing view or between keyboard-focusable views in project or disk browser windows.
Remedied the omission of the Columns commands from the Menus & Shortcuts preferences, so it is now possible to assign keyboard equivalents to those items (or hide the entire submenu, if desired).
Fixed bug in which trying to use the "Edit Markup" command from the contextual menu would report a 11104 error.
Worked around an apparent QuickLook bug in which clippings which had a "clear" background color (used when a light color scheme was in use) would display with a black background instead.
Worked around a Cocoa behavior in which the wrong window would be activated when dismissing the Find window and the window on which the search operated was on a different screen from the Find window. (When closing a window, Cocoa activates the next window that is on the same screen as the window that was just closed, rather than the window that was in front when the window being closed was previously activated. This is apparently normal operation, but in cases like this would lead to confusion when search operated on the correct window, but a different window got activated.)
Fixed bug in which path tooltips were not shown for top-level items on the Window menu.
Fixed bug in which double-clicking on an item in a Zip archive that was being browsed would not open it into a new document window.
Fixed a bug in which the search history menu would malfunction when invoked via the keyboard equivalent.
Put in some armorplating to prevent a crash which seems to occur when the computer's display configuration changes and Cocoa reports that there are no screens attached.
Made some changes to improve efficiency in the progress-dialog mechanics.
Fixed bug in which using the AppleScript interface to set the position property of a window would fail when one of the coordinates of the point had a zero value.
Fixed the title of the Undo string for "Canonize".
Reworked the JSON language module's syntax coloring to better handle invalid data so that it doesn't corrupt the coloring of the valid data that follows it.
Made a change so that duplicate removal for the Open Recent menu no longer attempts to resolve references to files. This is much faster, and works around delays caused by remote servers or attached disks which are are unavailable or very slow to respond.
Restored missing menu item entry for "Split/Unsplit Text View" (View => Text Display) so that its keyboard equivalent may be changed if desired.
Fixed bug in which the title of an FTP/SFTP browser window did not update as you moved up and down the directory hierarchy.
Fixed a regression in which Control-single/double-quote didn't work to toggle "Use typographer's quotes" on the fly as in previous versions.
Made a change so that Undo after a Replace All, Revert, or Reload will behave the way it used to before 12.0, and put the selection range back where it was before the operation was performed.
Made a change to break a deadlock that could occur while an editing window was being drawn.
Fixed bug in which modified documents got check marks in the document navigation (navigation bar) menu, instead of the intended bullets.