BBEdit needs:
• A MUCH stronger Find and Replace manager (LIKE BATCH PROCESSING) - but I've already mentioned it, and regardless of the fact everyone developer I know would benefit GREATLY from such a feature, the developers refuse to make it, because it's too hard.
• Better Recent document management. What do we get now? A non-configurable (w/o hacking) interface that remembers a handful of documents. I've suggested methods of enhancing the Windows palette to partition itself into two sections, and of course...the GUI gods at BareBones put their own bias over customer needs. At LEAST they could offer a Preference entry for how many recent documents we'd like to see. An no, a clunky File Group is not a viable solution.
• Better Color Management. Some of us use black backgrounds...well that means that if we want to print our code in color, none of the color values print worth a damn because their brightness levels are too high. Why not offer a brightness reduction during printing for those of us using low emission settings?
• Better Spell Checker. What year is it? The suggestions and overall interface is in dire need of some serious love. 7.0 should definitely have addressed the last two versions that barely changed this interface. I was specifically told when version 6.0 came out that Spell Checking was going to get a boost in functionality. Still waiting.
• Better line selection. Simple...you click the line number, the line is selected. WOW! I'm a genius!
• Better Font Management. Do we really need to select through every version of a single font? Where are the programmers self-respect? Why not integrate the OSX Font Panel?
• Where did the table builder go? This was a GREAT piece of software that just disappeared, and yet it solved a HUGE labor problem in laying out tables. No it wasn't perfect, but when I need a perfect number of columns and rows, it was there for me.
• Improved Document Info panel. It's nice to know how many characters are in a document, but what about which character I'm on? Thanks for the ROW / CHARACTER indicator, but that doesn't do a thing for tracking error log info that says you have a syntax error at character 433 in document blah.cgi.
• Improved ƒunction menu. I like the enhancements for HTML section recognition, but how about noticing the functions I've called within Perl sub routines. As in:
myProcedure
goDoSomething
goDoSomethingElse
All in all, I'm a little sad with 7.0. BBEdit is a text editor first and foremost. When a company loses sight of their core business, they start to decline, and eventually disappear. 7.0 is the first step into the grave without going to Windows. Keep terminal software, ftp images, and all other extraneous stuff OFF the R&D plate until you've mastered text editing.
-m-
On Wednesday, November 13, 2002, at 08:29 AM, Bill Stephenson wrote:
Did you see that rectangular text selections made it into BBEdit 7.0 :) Not
only was Jim listening to us, he (they?) must have worked pretty hard to get
this feature ready in time for the 7.0 release. Looks like some other cool
features are in there too. I'm getting mine now!
--
Bill Stephenson
