SUPPORT : BBEdit : Developer Info
This page provides information for developers who wish to:
- provide an "Edit in BBEdit" command in their application;
- extend the capabilities of BBEdit, TextWrangler, and/or Mailsmith with a plug-in;
- implement a language module to support syntax coloring and/or function navigation for a source code language not presently supported by BBEdit
Edit in BBEdit
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.)
(Read more about using BBEdit and Frontier together.)
Learn how to implement an Edit in BBEdit command in your application.
BBEdit Plug-Ins
Developers can extend BBEdit to perform various text-related tasks by means of plug-ins (in previous versions of BBEdit, these were referred to as "BBEdit Extensions", but the name was changed to as to avoid confusion with system extensions). Plug-in modules 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.
(See some of the plug-ins that developers have written.)Language Modules
BBEdit 6.0 introduced the ability to extend BBEdit's syntax coloring and function navigation to include languages not supported at the factory. If you are a language designer and would like your customers to be able to utilize BBEdit's syntax coloring and function navigation services while editing source files written in your language, we encourage you to include a BBEdit 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 6.0.2 of BBEdit. In addition, BBEdit 6.1 introduced changes to language module construction to support development of language modules that run natively on Mac OS X. Get the update.