21st Century Digital Boy

This might totally screw up my thesis about BBEdit release dates.

So I’ve been screwing around with Emacs again, and generally remembering everything I love and hate about Emacs.

Mostly hate.

Anyway, I always end up back in BBEdit. And I started wondering about, since they added a few features I wanted like folding, I wonder if the next release will support some new stuff, like improved syntax highlighting.

That got me wondering: so just when is the next release?

They’ll never tell you of course, but it only took about 5 minutes here and here to figure it out.

Very broadly speaking, Bare Bones releases an update (”point release”) of BBEdit every couple of months. To wit:

8.7 was released 8/6/07
8.7.1 was released 10/31/07
8.7.2 was released 12/19/07

8.6, 8.5, etc generally follow the same pattern.

What’s else, missing the window has almost always tended to be a larger release (”minor version”); really missing the window hints a major release is brewing. Although it’s hard to call some 16 months from 8.6.2 to 8.7 “minor”, I assume you tend to follow the major.minor.point system.

Anyway they’re only a couple weeks over, so it would be hasty to wonder if they’re baking a version with an embedded Javascript interpreter and radical syntax highlighting … but if 8.7.3 doesn’t show up by the end of March, feel free to start speculating.

(please please please be working on better syntax highlighting and visible svn status, like in the status bar and includes for dynamic languages and …)

UPDATE Well it’s a couple days to April, no betas posted on the mailing list, so, I’m going to bet 1 (one) US Dollar that we’ll not see any updates for BBEdit for some time, perhaps a version 8.8 or even 9. We’ll see how my ostensibly fact-based prognostication goes.

I note that rather a lot of C-like languages (Javascript, PHP) are not “electric” in Emacs by default.

Is it fair to assume no one really uses Emacs for PHP any more? Or everyone just grits their teeth and writes their own electric mode?