I've been a user of BBEdit for over 10 years, and there's surely nothing better on the market; and usually, with every new version, I find nifty improvements. I'll also preface this by saying that, resistant as I can be to change, I've immediately adjusted, and happily too, to each new version. With version 10 though, it's not a matter of me adjusting or not, but what I feel to be the introduction of real flaws.
The worst course reversal has been in the Find function, and I hope it'll be set right again in the next version. Specifically: One of the very nice arrangements in previous versions was the handling of the Live Find feature. I used to do a Live Find on a document, then go to another document and do the same Live Find on it with no further ado. Now, I have to reënter the same thing all over again for each document. The Live Find also worked so that when I found the instance I was looking for I could just type over it, or arrow my way to what I wanted from there. No more! Now, I have to press Tab; to continue with the Live Find, I then have to go back to the Live Find box etc. Very irritating. A corollary of this new handling of Live Find: It used to be that when you were thru with one live find, you could proceed with another, by rekeying the key equivalent. Now if you do that, you still have the previous one to get rid of. The two separate Find windows don't make much sense; all the more so that if you change one, the other is changed as well. (The two separate windows might make some sense if they allowed us to have one search in a document, the other over a set of document. Even then, not much.) In the Find window, I used to be able to specify "Case Sensitive", "Entire Word", and "GREP", "Wrap Around", "Case Sensitive" in the Find window — with command keys. That's gone (and the check boxes for them to boot have shrunk really small): very, very inconvenient. ▸Please restore the command-key equivalents! And, especially if you don't do that, at least make those checkboxes some normal size again so we don't have to have the fine fingers of brain surgeons to click on them! I used to be able to manage my Find Patterns, from a very handy window reached thru Preferences. In that window, my patterns appeared in the order I had them: I could add them, rename them, delete them, or move them higher or lower in my menu. Now — as far as I can tell — there's no way of doing some of that: "Manage Patterns" appears as a line in that menu, and opens a window in which I can only add, delete, or rename: I can't move them in the menu. (Over time, some patterns become more important, or less important, to me: why shouldn't I be able to move them up or down in the menu?) The patterns do not appear in the order in which I have them, but in alphabetical order. [I just tried, by the way, to circumvent not being able to move the patterns in the menu — a pattern I'd named "variant. . .", I want it at the top these days — OK I'll rename it "AAA variant": to my surprise, BBEdit crashed.] In the Find Patterns menu — mine has 133 patterns in it (just counted) — the "Save" line used to be at the top. Now, idiotically, it's at the bottom: forcing me to scroll all the way down the list just to save a pattern. ▸At least put it back at the top! In sum, a lot of good features have been thrown over; I can't see why, either. Please restore them! (Don't get me started on those horrible document drawers, which global searches sometimes wind up creating.) ★★★ Finally, not bugs or disimprovements, but friendly suggestions for continued improvements (after the vs. 10 stuff I mentioned has been undone): ▸It would be nice to add a "Save Pattern" button directly on the Find Window: why should I have to open the "Find Pattern" list and scroll to a menu line to do this? This is surely one of the commonest things people do? ▸It would be nice if Find Pattern submenus were available: so that those of us with long sets of find patterns could group them, and navigate to individual patterns faster and more logically. (Some of my patterns deal with stuff I do to document on one part of my site but not the others; some are manipulations of polytonic Greek — checks for example that there are no unaccented words other than enclitics, etc.) Thanks in advance for considering these improvements — BT -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "BBEdit Talk" discussion group on Google Groups. To post to this group, send email to bbedit@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to bbedit+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at <http://groups.google.com/group/bbedit?hl=en> If you have a feature request or would like to report a problem, please email "supp...@barebones.com" rather than posting to the group. Follow @bbedit on Twitter: <http://www.twitter.com/bbedit>
