BBEdit, I love you, but please can we have a few more things?

BBEdit is made by Bare Bones Software. For text editing, I’ve never used anything better. I swear by it. It’s got absolutely amazing search / replace, regex support, shell worksheets, and the fact that I can write a plugin in pretty much any language ever made is unbelievable.

That being said, it’s still missing a few things that I’d love to see. I know I sound greedy, but I did pay about 180 for a text editor.

1. I don’t understand the Disk Browser. Why would I want a read only view of my files? It looks exactly like an editor, why can’t I just edit the files inline? Please make the disk browser functional and let me edit my stuff.

2. Better code completion. This isn’t entirely accurate, since you can use snippets to sort of do the code completion. I’ll be honest, if it had TAB auto completion with a drop down (like Visual Studio), I’d be willing to write the needed scrips to auto create snippets libraries based on PHP projects. Throw it on a shortcut key and we’ll be in business.

3. Enhanced split window mode. How about the ability to have 2 different documents in 1 split window?

4. To elaborate on #3, I’d also like to be able to use a shell directly in bbedit, as the second half of a split window. Or a shell worksheet works. I’d be cool with that.

5. Adding to #1 – one thing I like about Eclipse is that it reads in my directory and lets me quick open files with apple-shift R, then I can just type in the filename and it regex matches. It would be nice if when I’m using my editable disk browser I could do this.

Till then, I guess it’s a mix of Eclipse and BBEdit…