Tools for Practitioners: BBEdit 9 Upgrade
Many mental health professionals, particularly those in individual or small group practices with a strong web presence, often wear a technologist’s hat at least part of the time. If you’re one of those folks who sometimes needs to get their hands dirty under the hood of a website — maybe even do a bit of hand coding in PHP, Javascript and the like — the latest upgrade to the venerable BBEdit text processor has several new features to offer.
Long time readers will know we’re big fans of the Mac OS X software package BBEdit, arguably the single most powerful text processing tool available on any platform. With a new ‘projects’ feature, modeless find, a persistent scratchpad, automatic text completion, and a whole host of bug fixes and other minor new features, BBEdit 9 is the latest upgrade to Bare Bones Software’s leading text processing tool. It’s easier than ever to use the tool’s main find and replace capability across a single file or across thousands, and working on a file that’s part of a defined collection is now a simple one-click affair. Can’t remember the exact syntax of a particular XHTML tag or the full name and parameters of a PHP function? No problem — BBEdit can fill in the details for you at the press of hotkey.
The new bells and whistles do come at a price, though: the new modeless find dialog boxes, for example, now require a different set of shortcut keys to drive them, and you’ll have to navigate your way through a total of three different find dialogs, each tailored for a specific purpose.
Read our review of the BBEdit 9 upgrade for the full scoop, and see if this is the ‘power tool’ for all your text processing needs.
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This article was last reviewed by on Tuesday, 9th December 2008. You can leave a reply below.
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http://counsellingresource.com/features/2008/12/09/bbedit-9-upgrade/
15th December 2008
Thanks for the review - since a large majority of your readers probably use a windows platform I wonder why you didn’t include the rather crucial piece of information that BBEdit is exclusively a OS X (mac) application (?) no windows version !
16th December 2008
Good point, Anders — although we did include the Mac OS X system requirements in the actual review, I didn’t originally mention that in this brief blog post announcing the review. I’ve updated the text above so that’s clear now.
Many Windows users have wondered whether there is a similarly capable text processor available on their preferred platform, but unfortunately I haven’t yet encountered anything that fully fits the bill.
All the best,
Greg