David Kendal has written a very nice review of the just-released BBEdit 10. As a long-time user of BBEdit myself, I was very interested in his point of view — he uses BBEdit more intensely than me and I trust his good eye for the finer details. He doesn’t disappoint:

[BBEdit’s] decidedly minimal window layout consists of just a toolbar containing a small amount of information and display options; the text area; and a thin bar displaying more document information, such as word count, source language, and encoding.

Once dug into, it can reveal more UI elements as needed, like a sidebar for file browsing. This isn’t there until it’s needed, however, so BBEdit always seems to make excellent use of the available screen space.

BBEdit continues to offer an excellent set of built-in features. Text manipulation tools like hard-wrapping, email-style quote level alteration, automatic commenting/uncommenting of selected text, quote education, tabs-to-spaces conversion (and vice-versa), and many more are built in to the editor as standard — and the ability to write filter scripts makes the addition of further tools simple for those who know any standard Unix scripting language.

I’ve used BBEdit 8.7.2 for a long time and I updated to version 9 not long ago, so when BBEdit 10 was released I wasn’t sure I would update again soon, but both the application price reduction and David’s thoughtful and concise review are definitely driving me into getting it sooner rather than later.