Posts Marked with the ‘BBEdit’ Tag

After upgrading to BBEdit 9, I’ve happily left TextMate behind and returned to my favorite bare-bones IDE for Rails development. (I’m planning to share some tips on this topic this weekend.)

I just came across a very strange bug that crashes BBEdit, and thought I’d share a workaround in case someone else has this problem. The bug report has already been filed.

Operating environment:
BBEdit version 9.0 (1320) of Wed, 27 Aug 2008
Mac OS X 10.5.4 Build 9E17

To reproduce:

• Create a new file
• Set its type to Ruby using the menu at the bottom of the window
• Type (not paste) the following, exactly as you see it here:
  

  "tag-#

BBEdit will now invoke the spinning beach ball of death, start consuming massive CPU cycles, and never recover. Note that I have text completion triggers turned OFF, so that’s probably not the problem.

The workaround for this is (and any similar string that brings this on) is open the Scratchpad window (Window -> Show Scratchpad), type your string in there, and paste it back into your Ruby file.

I should point out that a couple of minor issues aside, I’m incredibly happy with this upgrade. And given my history with Bare Bones, I expect fixes to be forthcoming quickly.

About a month ago, I replaced my old SVN GUI client (svnX) with the excellent Versions SVN client from Pico. I won’t rave about it now; check it out for yourself and bask in the goodness.

One of the unfortunate side-effects of using Versions, however, was that after the mandatory upgrade of SVN from 1.4 (OS X default) to 1.5, BBEdit’s SVN support was broken. I kept getting the message “svn: This client is too old to work with working copy“. Grr.

I looked around in BBEdit’s preferences and even .plist files, to no avail. This morning I even filed a bug report with Bare Bones. Turns out that that was premature… BBEdit was doing the right thing all the time, using the system’s SVN. The problem was that I had multiple versions of SVN installed.

From the command line:

Cerberus:bin bantik$ which svn
/usr/local/bin/svn
Cerberus:bin bantik$ svn --version
svn, version 1.5.1 (r32289)
   compiled Jul 25 2008, 12:47:20
...

As expected. However, this was less than expected:

Cerberus:bin bantik$ find / -name "svn" -print | grep svn
/opt/subversion/bin/svn
/usr/bin/svn
/usr/local/bin/svn

OK, but maybe some of those are links?

Cerberus:bin bantik$ ls -al /opt/subversion/bin/svn
-rwxrwxr-x  1 admin  admin  788520 Jul 25 14:05 /opt/subversion/bin/svn
Cerberus:bin bantik$ ls -al /usr/bin/svn
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  23 Jul 13 09:41 /usr/bin/svn
Cerberus:bin bantik$ ls -al /usr/local/bin/svn
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  23 Aug  3 19:39 /usr/local/bin/svn
       -> /opt/subversion/bin/svn

Aha! I’ve got an old version of SVN at /usr/bin. So let’s replace that with a symbolic link to the new version:

Cerberus:bin bantik$ sudo rm /usr/bin/svn
Cerberus:bin bantik$ sudo ln -s /opt/subversion/bin/svn /usr/bin/svn

That should do it. I restarted BBEdit just to make sure, and now, like magic, Subversion integration works again.