Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/ BBEdit 10.5 Adds Versions and Brings Web Sites into Projects Glenn Fleishman [1]BBEdit may be a hoary old beast, but you wouldn't know it to look at just-released version 10.5. Bare Bones regularly gives its flagship program youth treatments that slough off the crufty parts and invigorate the program with new life. In the latest release, that includes automatic versioning, integration of Web site management into its Projects feature, and a new Go menu. There's a long list of minor improvements and an even longer list of bug fixes, too. The release, also refreshed to look crisp on Retina displays, simplifies. The toolbar now takes up less vertical space and has fewer discrete icons on it (bye bye, pencil), but maintains the same functionality. Items have been shuffled and combined to remove redundancy in menus and dialogs. For instance, Convert to ASCII is now part of Zap Gremlins. (Pyoo! Pyoo! Got 'em!) This release ties into Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and 10.8 Mountain Lion's Versions feature without borrowing the interface. Instead, all files saved locally have each subsequent save recorded as a new version. BBEdit 10.5 uses a new Search > Compare Against Previous Versions item to select a version by date and time, and then manage a comparison using its familiar difference engine. The latest version's date and time are shown in the status bar, along with a lock icon that may be toggled to protect against changes. Versioning can be turned off using a supplied command in Terminal. [2]Image This is a very nice addition to BBEdit's long-time support for version-control systems like SVN (Subversion) or P4 (Perforce). While Apple's Versions isn't nearly as powerful as such systems, the automatic commit on each will save a lot of heartache as a no-effort recourse to older renditions of files you're working on. BBEdit has always done a great job in 'journaling,' or keeping an up-to-the-keystroke record of file changes that are recovered automatically in the event of a program or system crash or power outage, and this new feature fits right in. (In the same train of thought, BBEdit has dropped offering a CVS menu option for that older version-management software.) Site management in previous versions of BBEdit required using a separate palette and then linking folders in the Finder. I found it usable, but awkward to set up and manage changes, and apparently so did Bare Bones. In 10.5, the Sites palette is gone, and site features appear directly in Project windows. The Project feature already lets you reference local folders and files as well as ones stored remotely (using FTP and SFTP). It's a natural way, too, to organize site features, which are found by clicking a rain-cloud icon (we have a query out as to why it's a rain cloud). The Site's dialog also includes automated pre-flight features to check syntax and other factors before uploading that were previously split up and required manual selection. [3]Image The Go menu should be a hit with anyone writing code, including JavaScript. It consolidates and expands navigation options to find your way through code functions, line numbers, and 'jump points' that you can mark in a file. A Go > Named Symbol shows every kind of element BBEdit can identify in a file, such as functions and global variables. [4][tn_BBEdit-deploy-site.jpg] Some users may find a new addition to preview windows useful as well. BBEdit already allowed setting CSS and HTML templates to use to preview documents as they would appear on a Web site. Now, you can pass a BBEdit file through an AppleScript, binary executable, or shell script before it's shown in the preview. For TidBITS, I could see scripting in a database and template component with our back-end systems that would allow a file to preview its full appearance as a TidBITS article page in a way that was previously impossible before publishing to our content-management system. The one problem introduced in this release is that the file list in the left-hand side of a Project window cannot be scrolled by using a mouse with the scrollbar (either by clicking or grabbing the thumb). Instead, you must use use a scroll-wheel on a mouse. The company's tech support says the problem is known and will be fixed in a maintenance release. There is so very, very much more with more limited scope, including fixes for Fortran formatting bugs. The [5]full list of release notes is, as always, a good read, especially for long-time uses. Note that the change from a pencil to a lock icon involved potential murder 'averted for now. Whew. References 1. http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/index.html 2. http://tidbits.com/resources/2012-12/BBEdit-versions.jpg 3. http://tidbits.com/resources/2012-12/BBEdit-go-to-symbols.jpg 4. http://tidbits.com/resources/2012-12/BBEdit-deploy-site.jpg 5. http://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/arch_bbedit105.html .