[ANN] BBEdit 14.6 (14D007) pre-release

[Rich Siegel]

Good afternoon folks,

We're currently working on an update to BBEdit 14 to add some new features and refinements, and address a few recently reported issues.

Note that this is a _pre-release_ version. The intent is to fix bugs and address areas of improvement based on what our customers have reported. However, since the software is at this point not fully tested, there _may_ be bugs and regressions.

If this prospect makes you nervous, then sticking with the public release versions is your best course of action. Nobody will be offended if you choose to do so; you're under no obligation to install and use anything but a public release. :-)

Complete change notes to date for all the pre-release builds in this cycle are available here:

<https://s3.amazonaws.com/BBSW-download/14.6_Notes.txt>

The change notes are organized into additions, changes, and fixes, and are annotated where appropriate with case numbers. So if you recognize a number corresponding to a support case that was opened for you, you can now verify that it's been fixed correctly. Please take the time to review the changes before using the new build -- it'll be worth your time.

One final note: If you run into a bug in a pre-release version, PLEASE DO NOT REPORT THE BUG TO THE LIST. This includes asking about whether others have seen the same problem. Instead, please send a bug report to <sup...@barebones.com> and we will deal with it there. This will help us keep the list discussion on topic and productive for all list members.

Here is the list of changes made since the 14.5.2 public release:

============================================================================

version 14.6 (14D007) (09-06-2022)

Additions
---------

* [DOC] The bookmark menu in the FTP/SFTP connection panel gets
"Add Bookmark" and "Manage Bookmarks" commands, so you can
perform those operations before connecting, if desired.

* [DOC] Added settings to the "Editing" preferences to specify
alternative characters for Show Invisibles, for tabs and for line
breaks. The arrows next to the respective edit fields will open
the macOS character panel. There are some restrictions; you can't
use letters and numbers, for example. You *should* use
punctuation, since that is generally more readable. The factory
defaults are "∆" (U+2206, "`INCREMENT`" option-J on US keyboards)
for tabs, and "¬" (U+00AC, "`NOT SIGN`", option-L on US
keyboards) for line breaks.

Changes
-------

* The low-level text rendering in BBEdit's editing engine has been
reworked to improve performance and OS compatibility (including
future macOS releases).

This change also brings improvements to Unicode character rendering
and application stability, and includes workarounds for longstanding
macOS bugs and performance regressions (Radar 34909871, FB5433254,
FB7654002, FB9979006, FB10429697, FB9971063) which manifested as a
constellation of symptoms, including:

* application hangs at startup (usually displaying "waiting
for macOS…" in the startup progress panel);

* application stalls when coming to the foreground after more
than a minute of non-use in the background;

* failure to render character glyphs in the editing area, such
that windows appeared to be blank;

* failure to display ligatures when supported by the font in use;

* use of a (system-determined) display font instead of the one specified
in the Editor Defaults preferences.

* slower than expected application startup time;

* Since (with the new text rendering) Unicode "private use area"
characters are no longer quite so toxic, the `DisplayPrivateAreaGlyphs`
expert preference is now on by default.

* Made changes so that Open File by Name doesn't completely tie up
the application in cases where building the search cache takes a
very long time. In such situations it'll be the same amount of
time before you get search results, but the application will
remain responsive for other uses in the meantime.

* When connected to an SFTP server, symlinks in the browser
window's listing will be annotated with the target of the
symlink.

Fixes
-----

* Made changes to reduce the amount of directory rescanning for
the directory caching used in Open File by Name and some other
places.

* Made a change to conserve memory used by marker data and other
structures.

* Changing a setting in a project's Site Settings panel will clear
the deployment state, so that you don't have to remember to use
"Re-Deploy Entire Site".

* [449991] Fixed bug in which completing a macOS system text
replacement (if allowed in the Completion preferences) would not
correctly replace any leading word-break characters in the
replacement trigger.

* Fixed error when opening files via a symlink on an SFTP server.

* Improved performance when sorting a very large number of items
in the FTP/SFTP browser window listing.

* Made a change to multi-file search and Text Factory processing
so that files are processed only once in cases where overlapping
folders (or projects) are specified as search targets.

* [450187] "`:`" is allowed as an identifier character in Unix
shell scripts, which fixes function detection when a
package-qualified function name follows Google's bash scripting
style guide.

* [434520] Fixed bug in which auto-pairing would behave strangely
in certain cases (usually by advancing the insertion point past
the next paired item rather than inserting a pair of the typed
character).

*fin*

The package can be downloaded from our web server:

<https://s3.amazonaws.com/BBSW-download/BBEdit-14.6_14D007.dmg>

Enjoy,

R.