Re: [MacPerl] Feedback on BBEdit 6

[Paul McCann <pmccann@maths.adelaide.edu.au>]

David wrote,
 
> Also, this is not meant to be part of the editor wars; if you are not
> a BBEdit user, please consider me demented and ignore this message :-)

Ditto: though I can claim to be a long-term Alpha user as well. For
TeX/LaTeX work I don't know of a better editor than Alpha, but given that
I'm writing scripts more often than I'm writing maths papers these days
BBEdit is open *much* more often. I think it's fair to say that I'm becoming
slightly addicted, particularly after some exploration of the multi-file
search capabilities, which are particularly delicious (and eminently useful
in all sorts of situtations). Errm, back towards being on-topic...

> I am a very happy, long time user of BBEdit, currently happily
> working with version 5.1 and so as soon as 6.0 came out I purchased
> it.  Unfortunately, I have just been through a series of disasterous
> upgrades where I replaced a perfectly good old version of software
> with a worse new version.  So, I am now staring at the BBEdit 6.0
> install disk, wondering, should I really rock the boat?

I have had mostly good experiences with BBEdit 6.

(1) As Vic Norton just pointed out, the MacPerl menu has been extended a
little. There are separate ""Run" and "Run in MacPerl" buttons as well as a
"Run in Debugger" button that wasn't in 5.1.

(2) The syntax colouring is a *lot* better in this version. See the release
notes for the additional cues it uses. This negates the need for a lot of
the "reorientation" within comments that used to be necessary to pull the
syntax colouring back into line.

(3) Not relevant to MacPerl, but the XHTML capabilities are fun if you're
tempted to look in that direction. It's also capable of some unicode
manipulation that might be more usefully paired with OSX ( ie 5.6+ Perl )
than in MacPerl as it currently exists. Not something I've explored yet.

6.0 did feel a little sluggish compared to 5.1, even after following the
tips in the readme for getting a quicker start-up time. Having lived with a
6200 for a couple of years in the late 1990's I'm definitely splitting hairs
here. *Anything*, with the possible exception of that lumbering Brontosaurus
known as Netscape 6, starts up on G3 machines in real time when compared to
life with a 6200. In any case, 6.02 seems to have restored the start-up time
to that for 5.1, as well as having fixed a few other glitches, so if you do
throw 6 on be sure to get the update. Finally, Navigation Services is on by
default in 6: it was (and is) giving me grief while saving files, but that
seems to be my personal blessing, and should be negated by a clean install
come the end of the working year... In any case, it's good to see that
BBEdit gives you the option of switching to the old-style save/open dialogs,
which work like a charm for me.

> FWIW, I am running MacOS 9.04
> on an original iMac SE, and I find it fairly unstable in general.

((Off Topic again...)) That mirrors a lot of my experience looking after a
dozen or so such machines here. One easy thing worth noting is that
applications become much more stable in 9.04 when you throw more memory at
them. Seems that a lot of the "minimum" and "recommended" settings are more
than a little inadequate for this operating system. I bump up the memory of
any app that's going to be used extensively to circa double the recommended:
subtlety of a sledge-hammer to be sure, but it often stabilises things. One
other thing I've had is a long and ongoing battle with sleep and 9.04. Works
fine on some machines and in a regular but "unexpected" way on others. ie
selecting "sleep" manually from the special menu will not send the machine
into something more akin to suspended animation, requiring a hard restart to
wake it up properly. Lastly, the USB connection to mouse and keyboard can
often be flaky, and is sometimes lost after a period of sleep, giving the
appearance of a frozen system without the reality; plug out plug in often
wakes things up again. Later models don't seem to suffer from the same
problem anywhere near as much.

Cheers,
        Paul


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