MacMonth: Bare Bones Releases BBEdit 8.6
Amidst last week’s hoopla over the iPhone, Bare Bones Software quietly announced a new version of their flagship editor BBEdit. This release, which brings the venerable Mac text editor to version 8.6, features enhanced Java and TeX language support, and adds support for the Markdown structured text format.
The Markdown support includes coloring and folding of document structural elements, as well as the ability to preview the finished document using the “Preview in BBEdit” command, which leverages WebKit.
I have several modified versions of Markdown and unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to get BBEdit to use these for the native features, but the native version works well for quick previews.
Other enhancements include new commands “Save as Styled HTML” and “Copy as Styled HTML” which generate HTML code duplicating the layout and text styles of syntax-colored code. BBEdit can also now read and write the “binary property list” format, primarily used for preferences files in Mac OS X 10.4.
BBEdit 8.6 is also a maintenance release that fixes reported issues and adds several other refinements. For a complete rundown, check out the release notes.
BBEdit 8.6 is a free upgrade for users with version 8.5.x. Users of BBEdit 8 may upgrade for $30, while those with version 7 can upgrade for $40. A new copy of 8.6 is $125.
