Web Savant/Web Savant - Disc 1.iso/Toolkit/BBEdit/BBEdit 4.5.1 Demo Folder/What’s New in BBEdit 4.5.1

Text File | 1997-11-02 | 27KB | 611 lines

What's New in BBEdit 4.5
====== === == ====== ===

This document describes the feature enhancements that are present in the
current release of BBEdit, including features that distinguish the
current "major" (4.5) release from the previous (4.0) release of BBEdit.

BBEdit 4.5 incorporates the following improvements:

The BBEdit Table Builder
--- ------ ----- -------
The standard BBEdit distribution now includes the "BBEdit Table
Builder", a visual table-editing application. The Table Builder gives
you the ability to create and edit HTML tables graphically. It is also
integrated with BBEdit, so that you can easily create tables using a
combination of textual and graphical editing approaches.

The HTML Tools palette features a "Table Builder" button; when you click
on this button, the selected table is sent to the BBEdit Table Builder
for editing.

Improved HTML Tools
-------- ---- -----
The BBEdit HTML tools have been extensively revised and refined.
Performance and reliability have been significantly improved in all
areas, and some user interface refinements have been made.

Reorganized "New" Commands
----------- ----- --------
The various "New" commands (which were previously distributed across an
assortment of menus) have been gathered into a single "New" submenu.
(Note that your reflexes will still work: Command-N still creates a new
editing window, and you can still choose the first command from the File
menu to create a new editing window.)

New Preferences
--- -----------
the Preferences dialog has been reorganized and enhanced. There is now a
"Languages" panel which contains settings for assigning languages to
file suffixes. These settings were previously part of the "Function
Popup" preferences panel. In addition, you can now set languages for
files that have no suffixes (the "no suffix" setting), as well as for
files that have a suffix, but which don't match any of the established
settings (the "default" setting).

In addition, there is now a "Web Browsers" setting, which enables you to
manipulate the list of Web browsers available to the HTML tools
"Preview" command.

Finally, the "Backup" preferences panel gives you the ability to set a
backup location for all files. Please note that files created by
previous versions of BBEdit which contain their own backup settings will
continue to use those settings; you may use the "Backup Options..."
command on the File menu to change this.

MacOS 8 Support
----- - -------
BBEdit 4.5 supports MacOS 8 contextual menus. To see the contextual
menus in action under MacOS 8, make a text selection in an editing or
browser window, hold down the Control key, and click on the selected
text. A menu will pop up, giving you access to tools for performing
specialized operations on the selection. In group windows and disk
browsers, you can control-click on a file to pop up a contextual menu
for operating on that file.

If you create a clipping file by dragging a text selection to the MacOS
8 Finder, the clipping file will be named "BBEdit text clipping" to
identify its origin.

Tools List Window
----- ---- ------
A single "BBEdit Tools" floating window replaces the collection of
floating windows in previous releases of BBEdit. This window presents a
hierarchical list of installed BBEdit tools. You can use the "Set
Key..." button to assign a keyboard equivalent to a selected tool, or
the "Run" button to run that tool.

Browser Window Improvements
------- ------ ------------
The appearance of browser windows (disk, glossary, project, compile
errors, search results) has been refined to be more usable and to occupy
less screen area. All browser windows offer a function popup (to
navigate files without opening them), options popup (to control
display), path popup (to navigate the path to the file), and the Get
Info icon.

Improved Grep Pattern Storage
-------- ---- ------- -------
Grep patterns are now stored in a "BBEdit Grep Patterns" text file in
your Preferences folder. This ensures that Grep patterns are preserved
even if you discard your BBEdit Preferences file.

Copy to FTP Server
---- -- --- ------
The "Save a Copy to FTP Server..." command has been added to the File
menu. This command will save the front window to the desired FTP server,
but will not relocate the file. In that sense, it is the FTP analog of
"Save a Copy As...".

The following features in BBEdit 4.5 were added after the original release
of BBEdit 4.0:

Editing via FTP
------- --- ---
BBEdit features two commands on the File menu: "Open from FTP Server"
and "Save to FTP Server". These commands make it easy to edit text files
residing on a remote FTP server (including Web servers which are
accessible via FTP).

Multiple Undo
-------- ----
BBEdit gives you the ability to undo more than just the last change you
made to a file. Because the "Undo" command no longer changes to "Redo"
when you have undone an action, there is a new "Redo" command on the
Edit menu. To reverse the effects of an Undo, choose the "Redo" command.

Startup Items
------- -----
When it starts up, BBEdit 4 will look for a folder named “BBEdit Startup
Items” in the same folder as the BBEdit application file. If it finds
such a folder, BBEdit will open any documents it finds in that folder.

If you place a text file, picture file, or BBEdit file group in this
folder, BBEdit will open a document window appropriate to that document.

If you place a compiled OSA (AppleScript, or any other OSA-compliant
scripting language) script in this folder, BBEdit will execute the
script.

If you place any other type of document in this folder, BBEdit will ask
the Finder to open the document.

If you wish, you may place the actual BBEdit Startup Items folder in any
convenient location, create an alias to it, and place the resulting
alias in the same folder as the BBEdit application file. Having done so,
be sure to change the name of the alias to "BBEdit Startup Items" so
that BBEdit can properly locate it.

What's Fixed in BBEdit 4.5.1
====== ===== == ====== =====

The following minor enhancements are new as of BBEdit 4.5.1:

+   the range of the horizontal scrollbar has been doubled, to
    facilitate viewing of files with very long unwrapped lines.

+   BBEdit's internal maximum search string length has been increased
    from 1024 to 4096 (4K) characters.

+   The Find dialog has been reworked so that you can edit very large
    search strings. There's no provision for a scroll bar; the text
    fields will autoscroll as you move through them. (If you routinely
    find yourself modifying very large search and replace strings, you
    may find it helpful to use an editing window as a scratch pad, and
    then choose Enter Selection.) The text fields in the Find dialog use
    Monaco 9, but if you have ProFont installed, BBEdit will use that
    font instead. (ProFont is a more readable version of Monaco; it may
    be found on the BBEdit 4.5 CD.)

+   the Grep Patterns section of the Preferences dialog has been
    reworked to support the editing of larger Grep patterns.

+   when printing a document that is soft-wrapped to the window width,
    BBEdit will soft-wrap the document to the printed page width.

+   BBEdit is now SmartScroll-aware. For more information on SmartScroll,
    see <http://www.Kagi.com/Authors/Marc/> on the Web.

+   Change Case will now remember its settings across runs of BBEdit.

+   when checking HTML files (as determined by the file name suffix or
    the default language setting), the spelling checker will ignore
    properly formed HTML entities.

+   Find Differences has been substantially beefed up:

    +   you can now elect to have BBEdit ignore typographer's quotes when
        doing the comparison. When "Ignore Curly Quotes" is turned on, the
        following the lines are considered identical:

        This is BBEdit’s idea of a “smart” quote.
        This is BBEdit's idea of a "smart" quote.

        Support for this option is also in the scripting interface, as
        "ignore curly quotes".

    +   The "Find Differences" dialog has been rearranged for greater
        readability, and the file path areas have been enlarged to
        accommodate longer path names.

    +   when performing a multi-file Compare, you can instruct BBEdit
        to only compare files when they contain (or don't) a literal
        string or Grep pattern, subject to the settings in the "Multi-File
        Compare" section of the dialog. It works like this:

        Given a pair of files (A, B), the following settings have
        the following meanings:

        *   if "contain" is selected, then A and B will be compared if
            -either- file contains the specified literal string.

        *   if "match" is selected, then A and B will be compared
            if -either- file contains a match to the specified Grep
            pattern.

        *   if "don't contain" is selected, then A and B will be
            compared if -neither- file contains the specified literal
            string.

        *   if "don't match" is selected, then A and B will be
            compared if -neither- file contains a match to the
            specified Grep pattern.

    +   when performing a multi-file Compare, you can instruct BBEdit
        to ignore non-text files. This is useful when comparing Web sites
        and other folder hierarchies that contain large numbers of non-text
        files.

+   BBEdit now supports "Dreamweaver", the new HTML editing tool from
    Macromedia. See <http://www.dreamweaver.com/> for more information.
    (If you don't have Dreamweaver installed, clicking on the
    "Dreamweaver" button in the HTML Tools palette will take you there.)

+   There are two new plug-ins: "Internet Tools" and "Compiler Tools".
    Each of these is a small floating palette which gives you access to
    frequently-used applications which support BBEdit. The Internet
    Tools palette will show, by icon, the "helper" applications that you
    currently have specified in Internet Config. Clicking on an icon
    will launch the corresponding application (if it's available). The
    Compiler Tools palette gives access to the development tools and
    environments that support BBEdit: Symantec C++, the THINK Project
    Manager, the CodeWarrior IDE, ToolServer, and VOODOO. As with the
    Internet Tools palette, clicking on an icon will launch the
    corresponding application.

    Both palettes share the same features: if you click the zoom box of
    the palette, you can choose between a small and large view of the
    icons. Each palette will remember whether it was open when you quit
    BBEdit; if you leave the palette open when you quit BBEdit, it will
    reappear the next time you launch BBEdit. If you close the palette
    before quitting BBEdit, it will not.

The following reported problems were corrected in BBEdit 4.5.1:

-   BBEdit will now correctly import stored Grep patterns from an
    existing BBEdit 4.0.4 preferences file.

-   BBEdit no longer loses HTML Custom Markup macros when importing
    preferences from an existing BBEdit 4.0.x preferences file.

-   fixed a bug in which BBEdit would crash when trying to use some
    plug-in tools while another plug-in tool's floating palette was
    open. (This was usually reported as a crash when choosing the
    "Convert..." option of the HTML Table tool while CometPage was
    open, although neither CometPage nor the HTML Table tool was at
    fault.)

-   BBEdit will no longer crash when dragging an image or HTML file into
    an HTML file which is not the front window.

-   the C/C++ scanner will now properly color preprocessor directives
    of the form:

    #directive <some text>  //  comment
    #directive <some text>  /* comment */

-   fixed a bug in which completing a language keyword by typing inside
    of it would not properly re-color the keyword.

-   "Select Line" will now work correctly when used on the blank first
    line of a window.

-   fixed a bug in which text would flicker when typing on the first two
    lines of a soft-wrapped document.

-   Command-Forward-Delete now works again.

-   worked around a MacOS 8 bug which prevented text clippings larger
    than 1K (1024 bytes) from working when dragged to other
    applications.

-   worked around a MacOS bug which would cause small-font popup menus
    (such as the ones in an editing window's status bar) to get mangled
    when navigating those menus with Balloon Help turned on.

-   the "Find" and "Find All" buttons in the Find dialog are now
    disabled if you've chosen to search a group, project, or precompiled
    header file, but haven't chosen one to search.

-   fixed a cosmetic bug which would occur when the string in the "Quick
    Search" window was too long for the available space.

-   BBEdit will no longer crash if memory runs low while it's printing
    a picture.

-   the C++ scanner (used by the function popup) now correctly recognizes
    the C++ "operator () (...)" syntax.

-   if an error occurs while communicating with the Metrowerks debugger,
    BBEdit will now report it only once.

-   BBEdit now enforces a sensible minimum size for picture windows.

-   fixed bogus drawing which would occur sometimes when dropping items
    into the Find Differences dialog.

-   When doing a multi-file Find Differences, BBEdit is now better at
    figuring out whether two files are identical or not. (The quick
    comparison is now performed after linefeed conversion.)

-   If the "Don't List Identical Files" option is turned on in the
    Find Differences dialog, BBEdit will now present an alert if all
    of the files in common to both folders are identical. Previously,
    it would just put up a funny-looking Differences window.

-   if you choose "Copy" or "Save As" in a Find Differences window,
    BBEdit will now generate a correct listing of the differences
    (instead of garbage).

-   The spell checker will no longer flag as duplicated words which are
    separated by only a number, HTML tag, or entity (the latter two only
    when searching HTML files).

-   the Rez scanner (used by the function popup) will no longer crash
    when confronted with certain malformed Rez files.

-   fixed a bug in which Glossary keystrokes were not invoking the
    proper Glossary entries.

-   Undo now behaves correctly after performing a Zap Gremlins.

-   when doing a Replace All with Grep enabled, BBEdit now correctly
    handles situations in which the replacement text generated for
    a single match exceeds 4K. (Previous versions would truncate
    the replacement text, leading to undesired results.)

-   when performing a Replace All with Wrap Around and Grep
    turned on, BBEdit would fail to find and replace some
    matches of the Grep pattern.

-   the "Hard Wrap" scripting command should now work correctly in
    situations where it didn't before.

-   if a scripting command is received which specifies "selection only",
    BBEdit will now issue an error message if there is no selection on
    which to operate.

-   the vestigial zoom controls have been removed from the ASCII table
    and Window List floating windows.

-   BBEdit now verifies the position of group windows when reopening
    existing group files. This resolves situations in which group
    windows would appear off screen.

The BBEdit Table Builder has been updated to version 1.0.1, and features
the following fixes and improvements:

-   if the Table Builder encounters unknown attributes when importing
    or reading a table, it will store those attributes, and restore them
    to the generated HTML when saving or exporting.  This resolves
    situations in which the Table Builder would delete unrecognized
    table, row, or cell attributes.

-   if the Table Builder encounters something other than text, a
    picture, or a pure embedded table inside of a cell, it will create
    an "HTML" cell, which stores the raw HTML code (which may be edited
    as plain text when inside the Table Builder). This resolves
    situations in which the Table Builder would delete unrecognized HTML
    code.

-   You can now control the generation of HEIGHT and WIDTH cell
    attributes for an individual cell or group of selected cells, using
    the appropriate commands from the "Cell" menu. For existing tables,
    these settings will reflect the existence (or lack thereof) of these
    attributes in the imported table.

-   The Table Builder is much better behaved in low-memory situations,
    and should no longer crash if it runs out of memory. If Table
    Builder unexpectedly runs out of memory in the middle of an
    operation, it will first try to free up memory by closing any
    unmodified document windows. If there is still insufficient memory
    to continue, it will write the contents of all modified open windows
    to a file called "Table Builder Rescue File" at the top level of
    your startup disk before quitting itself.

-   fixed an error in the generation of WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes
    in which the generated attributes would sometimes differ from the
    requested values.

-   the Table Builder now generates correct HTML for text cells
    containing anchors.

-   a bug which would cause spurious -43 or -48 errors when saving
    files from within Table Builder has been fixed.

-   the Table Builder now correctly auto-sizes tables which include
    ROWSPAN and COLSPAN attributes but not WIDTH or HEIGHT attributes.

-   the Table Builder will now generate correct HTML when exporting
    manually entered links or links extant in imported HTML.

-   the Table Builder will no longer remove the "SRC" attribute for
    images that could not be located.

-   The Table Builder now prevents you from typing non-printing
    characters into the document title field or text cells.

-   The "Image Info" dialog matches the layout of the Image dialog
    used in BBEdit's HTML tools.

-   The obsolete "Space Before" setting has been removed from the
    Table Info dialog.

-   the "Quicktime is required to view JPEG files" alert has been
    removed. (You will still need to have QuickTime installed in order
    to view JPEG files; the annoying alert has simply been suppressed.)

-   URLs of the style "file:///path/file.gif" are now properly interpreted.

-   corrected a problem in which the Table Builder would sometimes emit
    HTML with asymmetrically balanced tags.

-   fixed a bug which would cause the Table Builder to sometimes hang
    when selecting "Send to BBEdit"

-   the Table Builder now supports relative URLs which include folder
    aliases in the specified path.

-   the Table Builder now supports SmartScroll.

-   Command-/ (Command-Forward-Slash) now operates to zoom the front
    window, just as in BBEdit.

-   the Table Builder now spins the cursor to indicate progress while
    reading or writing HTML documents (and when importing and exporting
    from BBEdit).

The BBEdit HTML tools have been updated to version 2.2.1, and feature
the following fixes and improvements:

+   New tools are provided to support markup for frames, scripts,
    style sheets, and applets.

+   You can now control the behavior of the "Check Links" command.
    The "Check Links Options" command, available from the "HTML
    Debugging" submenu under the Tools menu, provides the following
    controls:

    -   "Always Show Warnings": if there are any warnings (for
        example, a link beyond the scope of the current server),
        an Errors window will appear to display those warnings,
        whether or not there are any errors.

    The remaining settings allow you to set some of the conditions
    for when the link checker issues warnings:

    -   "Remote Links": if the link checker determines that a
        link is not within your site (as set in the "HTML"
        section of the Preferences dialog), it will issue a
        warning if this check box is activated.

    -   "Folder Aliases": if one or more folders encountered in
        a file path are aliases, the link checker will issue a
        warning if this check box is activated.

    -   "Incorrect Filename Case": if the case of a file name
        as specified in a link does not match the actual case of
        the file's name as it appears on disk, the link checker
        will issue a warning if this check box is activated.

    You can also bring up the check links options by holding down
    the Option key when clicking on "Check Links" or "Check Site
    Links" in the HTML tools palette, or by using the "Check Links
    Options" button in the palette.

+   It is now much easier to specify which tools should appear in
    the HTML Tools Palette. To do this, choose "Configure Buttons"
    from the popup menu in the upper left-hand corner of the
    palette.

+   the Web Color Palette now remembers whether or not it was open when
    you quit BBEdit. If you leave the palette open when you quit BBEdit,
    it will reappear the next time you launch BBEdit. If you close the
    Web Color Palette before quitting BBEdit, it will not.

+   If you hold down the Option key while clicking the "File" button in
    the Anchor and Image tools, those tools will list every file on your
    hard disk. If you click the "File" button without any modifiers,
    those tools will only list eligible image or HTML files.

+   the Web Color Palette has been renamed to appear as "<HTML> Web
    Color Palette" on the menus, for consistency with the rest of the
    HTML tools.

+   the HTML link checker will now resolve and verify links which
    include a folder alias in the file path.

+   the HTML Table tool now provides the option to generate a "shell"
    table (that is, a table which contains the necessary structure and
    you need only fill in the appropriate content).

+   the old "Index Document" tool has been replaced with an all-new and
    improved "<HTML> Index Document" tool, which is much faster and more
    flexible than previous versions of the tool.

+   the Preview tool has been modified to work around various Web
    browser bugs (particularly, a bug in which Netscape
    Navigator/Communicator 4.0.x would misbehave when asked to preview a
    file with no open browser windows), and to add compatibility with
    more Web browser (particularly CyberDog).

+   the HTML syntax checker now recognizes <SPAN> and <NOSCRIPT>.

-   previous versions of the Update tool would only recognize the
    "#DONT_UPDATE#" placeholder if it appeared in ALL CAPS. The current
    version will now recognize the placeholder regardless of its
    capitalization.

-   the Anchor and Image tools are now intelligent about encoding
    special characters in URLs, and so will no longer encode characters
    such as "?", "&", "=" which can appear in CGI calls (for example).

-   the Update tool is now about 40% faster than before as the result
    of having addressed an internal performance bottleneck.

-   the Format tool will no longer interfere with whitespace occurring
    between matching <PRE> and </PRE> tags.

-   the "Check HTML" tool will no longer issue errors for <BR> in <TT>,
    nor for <BIG> or <SMALL> in <P>.

-   the Format tool will now remember the last format you used across
    invocations of the tool and runs of BBEdit.

-   the HTML checker will no longer complain about legitimate markup
    occurring within a <FONT> container.

-   the UnComment tool now correctly removes comments in situations
    where it didn't before.

-   the NCSA to Client Side image map converter now correctly converts
    spaces to commas where it didn't before.

-   when receiving a table from the Table Builder, the <HTML> Table
    Builder tool will now select the table.

-   the Update Site tool will now honor the line-break convention of
    any files that it modifies, rather than always writing out Mac
    line breaks.

-   the No Break tool will no longer (incorrectly) extend the selection
    to the start of the line before applying its markup.

-   the "Breaks" tool is now much faster than before, and Undo of this
    tool will now work correctly in situations where it didn't before.

-   fixed a bug in the table converter which would cause incorrect code
    generation when "First Line is Header" and "First Item is Header"
    are both turned on.

-   the Table Builder tool will no longer hang when asked to send a
    table containing more than 32K of HTML code to the Table Builder
    application.

-   the "Translate" tool now correctly sets the "Selection Only"
    checkbox when it is invoked. Also, the translation direction setting
    now defaults to the setting that was last used in that dialog.

-   fixed a bug in which an "Unknown Error N" (with N some small
    integer) would be reported when using popups from the tool palette.

-   the Preview tool will now correctly clean up preview temp files from
    remote volumes.

-   fixed a problem with the template used by the Index tool which would
    cause site and folder indices to be generated with incorrect URLs.

-   the NCSA to client-side image map converter was erroneously omitted
    from the standard installation. This has been corrected.

-   the HTML tools will only try to access the Root and Template
    directories when absolutely necessary. This eliminates the alert
    which would sometimes appear when starting up BBEdit.

-   the Image tool will now recognize the USEMAP attribute and fill in
    the proper settings in the dialog when editing an existing image
    tag.

-   the Breaks tool will now properly honor the HTML tag case setting.

-   fixed a bug in which attempts to Undo the action of the Paragraph
    tool would cause unpredictable results.

-   the HTML link checker no longer reports errors on fully-qualified
    URLs that reference the current site.

The FTP tool (used to support the "Open from FTP Server" and "Save to
FTP Server" commands) has been updated to version 4.5.1, and features
the following fixes and improvements:

-   the FTP tool scripting interface now behaves correctly when asked
    to fetch to a local file that doesn't yet exist. (It now creates the
    local file, rather than signalling a "File Not Found" error.)

-   when transferring a file via the scripting interface, the FTP tool
    no longer mangles plain file names passed as the "path" parameter.
    (It would previously delete the first character of the specified
    name before trying to transfer the file.)

=end=