XML News from Thursday, November 12, 2009

Bare Bones Software has released version 9.3 of BBEdit, my preferred text editor on the Mac, my favorite XML editor on any platforms, what I'm using to type these very words. This release fixes bugs and adds a new bbfind command line tool. On the downside, it makes an annoying and incorrect though not crippling change in handling UTF-8 encoded documents. UTF-8 with a byte-order mark is not a different encoding than UTF-8 without. I'll have to report the bug. The BBEdit developers have never really quite understood character sets and encodings, I'm afraid. They're 99% of the way there, but the 1% keeps itching from release to release.

Despite that minor quibble, I really, really wish BBEdit were available on Linux, and a Windows port wouldn't be unwelcome either. One of my co-workers turned me onto kate recently, and it's a little better than gEdit, even if it does insist on dirtying my X-term with pointless log messages; but it's still no BBEdit or TextMate. New copies cost $125. Upgrades from 9.x are free. Mac OS X 10.4 or later is required.