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              BBEdit 13.5 Offers Mid-Cycle Efficiency Improvements

   Adam Engst

   For many people, text editing means BBEdit, which has decades of
   thought encapsulated in its feature set and interface. But there's
   always room for improvement, as the latest update to [1]BBEdit 13.5
   makes evident with [2]over 100 new features, refinements, and fixes.

   The change that's simultaneously the most significant and the least
   impactful for today's user is that BBEdit now runs natively on Apple
   silicon. Until Apple ships the first Mac with Apple silicon, the only
   people who can take advantage of this code migration are developers
   using Apple's Developer Transition Kit, which is a Mac mini tricked out
   with an A12Z Bionic chip. Plus, it's impossible to know how differently
   BBEdit will run on the eventual Macs with Apple silicon'we can hope
   performance improves, but it's not like BBEdit is a slouch on
   Intel-based Macs today. Only the version of BBEdit 13.5 available
   directly from Bare Bones Software is universal; the Mac App Store
   version remains Intel-only because Apple isn't yet accepting universal
   apps.

   More interesting to the dedicated BBEdit user are the refinements that
   Bare Bones Software has integrated into this latest free update. Here
   are a few of the most notable:
     * Rescue 'Untitled' documents: An [3]ohnosecond is the fraction of
       time between doing something slightly wrong and realizing that your
       mistake has major consequences. Imagine creating a BBEdit document,
       working in it for quite some time in a difficult-to-reproduce
       fashion, and then accidentally closing it without saving. 'Oh, no!'
       BBEdit 13.5 aims to eliminate the ohnosecond by saving copies of
       untitled documents such that when you close and click Don't Save,
       you can get them back (via Window > Rescued Documents). The feature
       is on by default, but you can disable it and adjust how long
       rescued documents stick around. (As a public service announcement,
       if you have BBEdit's backups feature turned on, it's worth checking
       and cleaning out ~/Documents/BBEdit Backups every so often. I
       haven't done it since 2016, so I'm using 1.88 GB for 5466 files. We
       hope Bare Bones will add an option to automatically remove backups
       after some period of time as well.)