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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