| Issue #64/Aug. '00 |
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Navigate: | My Mac Online | The Archives | November 1997 | Freeware Review- BBEdit Lite 4.0.1 | |
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By Fenton "Manavesh" Jones
BBEdit Lite is my text editor of choice now. It's always ready to take on unusual text tasks. While there are others, such as Tex-Edit Plus, that can also take on many of these, there is none that can do them all like BBEdit. It's small, fast, and stable. If you set it as your editor of choice in InternetConfig and Netscape, you may never have to see those "It's over 32K, SimpleText can't open it" messages again.
While small, it's quite powerful, able to use system memory to open text over its own memory limit. Built from the same base as the famous commercial version, it offers a broad range of tools.
It is not, however, a word processor. It only supports one font and one style at a time. Fortunately that's not usually a problem with large text tracts, such as those you'll pull off the Internet. In any case, you can open a SimpleText document that has styling, manipulate it in BBEdit, then save it. It remains a styled SimpleText document, incorporating only the changes you made.
Now, let's see what it can do. It has the most powerful search and replace functions I've ever seen. It can search for a particular bit of text in every document throughout an entire volume, or within a certain folder, returning a batch window of finds, much like a dedicated text search application. It can do find/replace operations on not just one, but many files at a time, even files belonging to other word processing applications. And they are fast.
One of its unique capabilities is "Grep" searching. It's a bit obtuse, and I know little about it, but it can do some simple things that a regular word processor just can't do. For example, I figured out this simple "regular expression," (^ *), which will find and eliminate all extra spaces at the beginning of lines. You get lots of those if you save web pages as text.
For simple repetitive search-and-replace operations just hit "Command-E" to "Enter Selection," then "Option-Command-=" to "Replace All." These operations are extremely fast. Or you can just select the word you want to find again, then "Command-H" to find it. This is by far the quickest way to look for contents that are listed at the top of a long page, such as in an Info-Mac Digest. Combined with the fast navigation keys, it's unmatched.
Web pages, and especially e-mail messages, are often limited to 80 characters in length. You can easily remove the 'hard returns' at the ends of the lines, so that they will wrap, with "Remove Line Breaks". This feature can be used on just a single selection if need be, to maintain lists, charts, etc.,all of which tend to get all mushed together otherwise. Also "Zap Gremlins" takes care of many of those odd characters that creep into documents, like boxes '', etc.
Another fairly unique and amazing feature is the ability to "Insert" files or folder listings into text documents. The common use would be to insert other text files into the one you're working on. But you can also insert a listing of literally every folder and file on your hard drive, or any other folder, as a tab-separated text document, which you could then print (for 100 pages). I don't know why you'd want to, but it's pretty neat. You can also copy the full path name of any open document.
There are many extensions available that can add more features. Some, however, only work with the commercial version. But you can use "Concatenate Files" to combine text documents, "Import" to import any text into BBEdit Lite (I just moved this WordPerfect document over), and "GetURL" to launch URL's (the commercial version supports simple Command-clicking, but not the free version, at least not yet).
For you students (and writers that get paid) there are comprehensive line, word, and even character counts. There are also tools such as "Change Case," and "Shift Left" or Shift Right" for making lists.
Last, but not least, are its easy-to-use navigational keys. If you, like me, lack an extended keyboard, you're often stuck with no easy (or easy-to-remember) way to page down in text editors. BBEdit, like newsreaders, supports the use of the keypad, specifically #3 for 'page down'. It also has the more common Command-arrows for 'home' and 'end', as well as line ends and beginnings; they also work for selections (with the shift key).
All and all, it's the best text manipulation tool for the money.
 BBEdit Lite 4.0.1 can be downloaded at the My Mac Software Library, at http://www.mymac.com/software .
Fenton Jones (manavesh@mymac.com)
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