Grep Better with BBEdit 6.5 -- Bare Bones Software has released a major new version of their invaluable flagship text editing program, BBEdit. Version 6.5 is now a unified "Fat Carbon" application, running natively on Mac OS X and back through Mac OS 8.6 (with CarbonLib). The internal regular-expression search engine, which was previously somewhat quirky and non-standard, has been replaced by a new search function based on the Perl-Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) library, adding new features and standardizing its behavior with standard Perl and Unix expressions. BBEdit 6.5 also adds syntax coloring and contextual markup support for Cascading Style Sheets, a long-requested feature. (The Check HTML Syntax feature still differs significantly from the W3C validator over what constitutes legal HTML, though.) Integration with Mac OS X is particularly impressive; BBEdit can now be invoked from the Unix shell (for example, command output can be piped to it), and, the other way around, BBEdit can run shell scripts, as well as Perl and Python scripts. BBEdit 6.5 is $120, or $40 to upgrade from a previous version (free if you purchased 6.1 recently), and comes with complete documentation plus amusing release notes. A launch-limited demo is available from the Bare Bones Web site. [MAN]

<http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/>
<http://validator.w3.org/>
<http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/bbedit -demo.html>