Bare Bones Software has announced the release and immediate availability of BBEdit 6.5, the latest major upgrade to its popular HTML and text editor for the Mac.
BBEdit 6.5 now includes markup and syntax coloring support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). BBEdit provides syntax coloring, navigation of rules using the built-in function pop-up menu, and contextual markup support. There’s also an automatic language-guessing feature to help simplify the use of code culled from different sources — BBEdit can figure out by inspecting the file’s contents how syntax should be colored and functions should be navigated. Syntax checking for WML 1.2 and 1.3 is now supported, as is PHP 4.
Although BBEdit was already Mac OS X-native, the software now integrates with Mac OS X’s UNIX-based command line scripting systems. It sports a new Authenticated Save feature that enables you modify and save files you don’t own, provided you know the admin password. This way, users can rely on BBEdit to change system config files and other related items without having to resort to the Terminal application.
Shell Worksheets enable you to execute Unix commands and view their output without leaving BBEdit. A new “bbedit” command-line tool even allows you to open files into BBEdit from a terminal window, or pipe output from other command line tools too. Long and Unicode file names are supported, and BBEdit 6.5 is now “theme-savvy” throughout the user interface. Syntax color and function navigation for Objective-C has been added, as has support for the Mac OS X Services menu.
The new version of BBEdit features an all-new grep engine based on the Perl Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) library. File filtering has also been improved for multi-file searching — a new “File Content” option enables you to filter based on file text content. Multi-file “Find Differences” operations can now take advantage of file filters, too.
BBEdit 6.5 carries a suggested retail price of US$119. A cross-upgrade price of US$79 is available for owners of various text and Web page editors and other qualifying products. And upgrades are available to owners of BBEdit 2.5 and later is available for US$39. More details are available from the BBEdit Web site. Owners of BBEdit 6.1 who purchased since August 1st can get a free upgrade, too.