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.
Other articles by Dr Greg Mulhauser, Managing Editor
This article was last reviewed by on Tuesday, 9th December 2008. You can leave a reply below.
The URL of this page is:
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