BBEdit 11.6
Bare Bones Software has released BBEdit 11.6, a significant update to the venerable text editor that adds support for Kite, an “artificial pair programmer” that evaluates code as you write. Kite also provides advanced code completion, error correction, and contextual documentation of library and API calls. Bare Bones has also tweaked BBEdit’s demo model, making it easier to try out the app’s advanced features. For 30 days, all features are available, after which BBEdit remains permanently functional with a reduced feature set along the lines of the company’s free TextWrangler editor — unavailable commands are badged with a Demo icon.
Purchasing a license at any time brings back the complete feature set.
Notable changes in BBEdit 11.6’s interface include a location field in the file info panel along with buttons to copy the full path and URL, a popover for navigating by line number, and a New Text Window command in the Dock menu. Bare Bones has tweaked the editing view, shrinking the toolbar, moving the document icon to the right side of the toolbar, and condensing the text in the bottom status bar. Plus, a new Edit > Lines > Duplicate command duplicates the current line or selected lines, and Find Differences can now ignore blank lines and all whitespace. Be sure to read the voluminous release notes for more changes and details on numerous bug fixes. ($49.99, free update, 14.0 MB, release notes, 10.9.5+)
A couple of things that didn’t make the release notes:
• Syntax checking no longer puts up a dialog box on success. (This isn’t a bug so long as you’re aware of the change.)
• Flake8 is really annoying; it even reports as _errors_ spacing it doesn’t like in Python comments. If you happen to have it installed, there’s no way to prevent it from taking over the old Check Syntax menu item. I tried to install a custom configuration file for it (which is inadequately documented), but that didn’t hush all the insanity, so I ended up having to move the executable.
• The good news is that if you want to use Flake8 occasionally in its disabled position, you can now use bbresults on it from the scripts menu:
/usr/local/bin/flake8_OFF "$BB_DOC_PATH" | bbresults --pattern flake8
How did you get linting to work in the first place? I keep hearing it works, sadly with Flake8, but I'll take anything right now (with BBEdit).