BBEdit now handles the (badly chosen, IMO) “txmt:” URL scheme. This allows properly formed “txmt:” URLs generated by the Ruby On Rails “FootNotes” plug-in (and some others) to open files in BBEdit and (optionally) select a requested line and column. (NB: If the system doesn’t correctly recognize BBEdit as an allowable handler for such URLs, RCDefaultApp is a good tool for adjusting the bindings.)

Typed through gritted teeth no doubt. Though you have to give Rich credit—it’s real dedication to his users to swallow his pride and adopt an emerging standard instigated by a competitor. From the TextMate manual:

The txmt URL scheme allows you to open files in TextMate via hyperlinks found for example in HTML documents (anchors). These can refer to local files which can be useful when:

Using commands with HTML output that indicate errors/warnings with the current document, or refer to other documents in your project.

If you are generating a set of web-pages from simpler (text) files you can have these link to the original text files, so that when you are inspecting the generated result (in a browser) you can quickly edit the source of each page by following the txmt:-link.

The URL scheme is txmt: and currently has one command named open. This command takes up to three arguments:

• url — the (file) URL to open (e.g. url=file://~/.bash_profile), if this is left out, the current document is targeted.
• line — the line on which the caret should be placed after opening the file (e.g. line=11).
• column — the column on which the caret should be placed after opening the file (e.g. column=3).

Gloating done, the scratch pad feature also looks interesting. So if you are still using the text editor that doesn’t suck™, you should check out the new release.

Changes is out of beta with a 1.0 release. Changes allows you to compare diretories and files and is Leopard only taking advantage of Core Animation and Quick Look. Offering editor support for BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextMate, and Xcode and version control integration for Subversion, CVS, Perforce, Mercurial, Git, Bazaar, and Darcs, Changes is shaping up to be a powerful alternative to FileMerge. Changes also has a number of advanced features such as a command line utility, a plug-in architecture, and F-Script support. A cool hybrid app. Ian Baird of Skorpiostech has been hard at work and was very responsive during the beta phase. (He addressed in a day a serious performance issue that arose in comparing text files with long lines that I reported.) So if you try Changes and like what you see, show him some love and buy a license.

There are a variety of ways to implement code folding. Sometimes special delimiters are used to mark where in the text the fold is to occur; other times the folding is syntax-based. If the implementation of code folding is syntax-based, then this feature will only be useful for writing if you are using some form of structural markup such as LaTeX or DocBook.

Developed in the 70s in the Lisp community, code folding editors are the ancestor of outliners, such as OmniOutliner and TAO. (For some of the hitory of outliners see Outliners.com, Dave Winer’s history of More and Ted Goranson’s column About This Particular Outliner.) The expanding and collapsing file system viewer that first appeared in MacIntosh System 7 was an abstraction of the code folding UI, an abstraction that informs the UI of a variety of programs today.

As I posted earlier, BBEdit 8.7 features improved code folding. Following on the heals of this, TextMate revision 1413 offers a small refinement to its folding GUI:

[CHANGED] The right-pointing folding arrow is another color to make it visually distinct from the up/down arrows. Thanks to Paul Howson.

The visual distinction is a nice detail. Not everyone, however, was thrilled with the implementation:

It’s not just that the orange is garish (it is), but it is sufficiently loud to drown out the gray down arrow. Thomas Aylott of subtleGradient, benevolent soul that he is, has answered the howls of protest on the mailing list with a customized nib and png files that provided a more muted contrasting gray for the right arrow. The results can be viewed here and the files can be downloaded here. Thanks, Thomas, for teh awesomeness!

New versions of BBEdit and SubEthaEdit are available.

BBEdit 8.7 includes improved code folding, LUA support, the ability to open the terminal. Interestingly, there seems to be an attempt to institute TextMate-style snippets, a method for “smart” text insertion:

Clippings—previously known as “the Glossary”, Clippings provide an easy way to capture and re-use frequently needed bits of text. Placeholders and embedded script invocation make it easier to add automation and “smarts”. A new Clippings menu and improved “Insert Clipping” command provide quick access to your existing clippings and easy creation of new clippings

SubEthaEdit 2.6.5 is a bug fix release.

• The Markdown language module now supports syntax coloring.

• If you choose “Preview in BBEdit” when a Markdown source file is in front, BBEdit will run your Markdown source through the Markdown script, and so your preview reflects what the file will look like in a web browser. Like the previews of HTML source files, the Markdown preview will update as you edit the file.

• The TeX language module has been significantly enhanced, with folding support, improved section/subsection detection for the function menu, much more robust math-mode detection, and greatly enhanced LaTeX support. These changes resolve various reported bugs, as well. If you wish to place a “marker” in the function menu, you can write a comment of the following form: %: this is a mark. This comment syntax matches that used by TeXShop. The new TeX module also includes some support for ConTeXt, in the form of recognition and generation of fold ranges for \startXXX…\stopXXX environments, and special-case support for the “mode” environment (we ignore the contents of the mode environment, because it often contains out-of-order environment start/stop commands which can confuse the parser).

I would have loved native Markdown support when I was using BBEdit. This is one feature that initially attracted me to TextMate. The native Markdown and improved TeX support has also been implemented in BBEdit’s free cousin, TextWrangler.

However, Erik’s complaint about TextMate’s lack of chunk undo was perhaps only a pretext to invite his readers to share what they take to be the comparative advantages and disadvantages of BBEdit and TextMate. I have licenses for both, but now only use TextMate. There were many reasons for the switch. Let me mention a few, not necessarily the most important reasons. I find TextMate’s snippets, a method for “smart” text insertion, superior in functionality and implementation to BBEdit’s Glossary function. While it is possible to extend BBEdit’s functionality, I found this much easier to do with TextMate’s bundle system—indeed it has allowed a nonprogrammer like myself to immediately implement things that I lacked the skills to implement in BBEdit. Lastly, TextMate just feels right. (In no small part because of what Rands describes as bright, patient design.) Subjective, to be sure, but not, thereby, irrelevant. Text editing is a craft. It is important to hone this craft with a tool that you are comfortable using. If for you that is BBEdit, or Emacs, or vi, or SubEthaEdit, that, in the end, is the most important thing.

One last piece of unfinished business. It has been pointed out to me that my previous complaint about Erik was based on partial and secondhand information and is intelligible only on assumptions about what may have transpired. Fair enough, I withdraw the complaint but continue to endorse the normative principle that underwrote it, a normative principle well expressed by Merlin Mann:

[The] heart of ethical and humane networking means not asking favors of others, but instead frequently doing unrequested propers for others. And expecting zilch in return.

Though I am a philosopher, this is not a philosophy blog, and yet somehow reflection on text editing has led us to Kantian ethics—surely a testimony to the power and currency of Kantian moral ideals.

[REMOVED] TextMate no longer pays tribute to human sacrifices, rape, nor does it show a picture of the God of the deaths in your dock – ticket 945BEB5D

Easter eggs occur in a number of programs, even text editors. BBEdit has hidden in its credits this wonderful easter egg:

editors.mp3

The song alludes to the Editor War waged between the advocates of Emacs and vi. The Editor War has produced a lot of humor and bad behavior in equal measure. I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing. It is a manifestation of communities of users who are passionate about the tools they use. And at least that’s admirable even if gratuitous flame wars aren’t. Squabbling over Emacs and vi continues to this day but is likely to strike some as the topic for gray-beards from the mists of time. But the struggle is eternal and can re-emerge with respect to other editors, in other contexts.

On the Mac platform the present combatants in the Editor War are TextMate and BBEdit. BBEdit is a long time Mac citizen and was the text editor on the Mac for almost as long—which is not to say that there weren’t good alternatives such as Alpha and Pepper. (Pepper had disappeared for awhile. See this Daringfireball interview with Maarten Hekkelman, Pepper’s developer. Pepper returned after that, but now has apparently disappeared again. Is this the last of Pepper?) The twenty-first century, however, has given rise to a renaissance in text editing on the Mac. There are a number of good text editors to choose from. One notable example is SubEthaEdit which has a clean interface and the neat niche trick of providing collaborative text editing by cleverly exploiting Apple’s Bonjour technology. Another is Aquamacs which successfully migrates Emacs from the terminal to the desktop nicely integrating it with the rest of the OS. TextMate has, quite reasonably to my mind, gotten a lot of press lately and some BBEdit users are apparently getting defensive as the latest incarnation of the Editor War manifests.

As for my two cents, I will confine myself to these to two observations.

The first is to call foul on MJD’s comment:

Something that really turns me off TextMate is the way Allan Odgaard is constantly attacks BBEdit, Barebones, and Rich Siegel.

Allan Odgaard, the developer of TextMate, has studiously refrained from explicitly comparing TextMate to BBEdit, in part, I would like to think, because he is sensitive to the ressentiment that can be so easily provoked. There’s a more fundamental reason though: He’s confessed to never using BBEdit.

The second is to observe that Erik seems to undermine the Mac developer ethos even as he extols it. Wouldn’t it be more in the spirit of things to do Allan a solid rather than demand that Allan does Erik a solid as the prevailing culture, as Erik interprets it, demands?

You have got to take the bitter with the better. If creating communities of passionate users runs the risk of flame wars erupting now and then, well, flame on.