Information for Developers
This page provides information for developers who wish to:
In order to facilitate the use of BBEdit as an external editor for various applications, we have devised (with the assistance of UserLand Software , the “ODB Editor Suite” (so called because its original purpose was to provide for editing text objects in the Frontier Object Database, or ODB).
The ODB Editor Suite is a proprietary standard, but documentation is now publicly available for those who wish to implement an “Edit in BBEdit” command in their application. (Currently, Frontier and various FTP clients support the ODB editor suite, but its utility is by no means limited to those sorts of applications.)
Learn how to implement an Edit in BBEdit command in your application.
Developers can extend BBEdit to perform various text-related tasks by means of plug-ins. These appear on BBEdit’s “Tools” menu, and can operate as simple subroutines which perform a single operation and return, or they can open a floating palette window for persistent user interaction.
Plug-ins have access to a rich set of callback services, and, for appeal to an even wider audience, can be written to be compatible with TextWrangler and Mailsmith as well.
If you are a language designer (or fan!) and would like BBEdit customers to be able to utilize BBEdit’s syntax coloring, language-aware folding, function navigation, and completion services while editing source files written in your language, we encourage you to include a language module with your product.
Language module development information is part of the complete BBEdit plug-in SDK, and may be downloaded from our FTP site: get it now.
Note: If you are planning to develop and ship plug-in language modules, you should be using at least version 8.5 of BBEdit, which mandates Unicode-aware language modules that run on both i386(Mac OS X Intel) and ppc(Mac OS X PowerPC) architectures.