As you may or may not know, I am an employee of MacRabbit, the company responsible for CSSEdit and Espresso. I typically don’t like to mix work and pleasure on my personal blog, but today MacRabbit has some exciting news: we have released a public beta (or “kaboom”, as we call our pre-release versions) for Espresso 2.0!

You can read more about the kaboom over on the Espresso blog, or check the Espresso 2 FAQ about upgrades and how to download.

What you will not find just yet are release notes, but for current Espresso users there are some changes between Espresso 1 and Espresso 2 that I wanted to point out to help make the transition between the two versions easier.

General changes

Quick Publish is no longer a file-by-file setting, and does not live in the Tools section any longer. To enable Quick Publish for your project, select an item in your Workspace (or double click a project file to open it in your workspace first) and toggle Quick Publish on there. When Quick Publish is on, all files in your project that you save within Espresso will be pushed automatically to your server. You will still need to use right click and “publish to” if you need to push images or other files that Espresso cannot edit.

Snippets are currently living in the Actions menu (down at the very bottom).

Some third-party sugars are no longer necessary. In particular, Espresso 2.0 offers native support for Ruby, Ruby templates (ERB files), Python, Markdown, Apache config documents, and JSON. If you have third-party sugars for these languages installed, you should remove them before testing Espresso 2.0. (Incidentally, we would really appreciate feedback from Ruby users! No one at MacRabbit actually codes Ruby, so although we think we’ve got some pretty good support for Ruby syntax coloring, it is highly likely that there are problems we have overlooked simply because we are not fluent in the language. Send that feedback in!)

Espresso 1.x themes may not work as well in Espresso 2. Although the HTML and CSS syntaxes have not changed their zone names, Javascript and PHP are very different, and the new Ruby, Python, and Markdown syntaxes do not share many similarities with their third-party antecedents.

The Indent New Line action has a new shortcut: control-enter. When I originally wrote the “TEA for Espresso” actions, I based a lot of them on Textmate (simply because that was what I was used to). However, it makes no sense to have Indent New Line (a very common shortcut for anyone who likes to keep their code nicely indented) require more modifier keys than the action that inserts a <br/> tag. So I swapped them. If you use this command as much as I do, muscle memory is going to be a beast for a little while.

The Actions menu has been shuffled around a bit to hopefully make finding text actions easier and more logical. Aside from Indent New Line mentioned above, shortcuts should remain unchanged.

Noteworthy new and improved actions

On the topic of the Actions menu, a lot of the work that I contributed to this release has to do with the included sugar actions, and there are some tasty additions that you might enjoy knowing about.

Zen coding is now running the latest version (there may be some bleeding edge improvements in zen coding that have not made it in, but if memory serves Espresso 2.0 includes zen coding 0.7 out of the box).

BBEdit ex-pats will likely be happy to find a new Zap Gremlins action in the Convert / Strip sub-menu. For those unfamiliar with the venerable BBEdit, Zap Gremlins will check your document for invisible control characters and non-breaking spaces, and allow you to remove or replace them.

Wrap With… offers the ability to wrap your selected text in arbitrary characters (located in the Text sub-menu). Give it a try; I think you will enjoy how it handles things like square braces, curly quotes, and multiple wrapped characters.

Balance and Balance Inward now work inside of strings (this is incredibly useful; just hit control-B while your cursor is inside a string) and should also function within just about any language that supports code folding.

And if you are someone who works with the Terminal a lot, right click on any file to quickly cd to its parent directory in the Terminal or execute the file itself.

Go forth and test

The Espresso 2.0 kaboom is pretty stable (I’ve been using it and its predecessors instead of Espresso 1 myself for a while without any major incidents), but remember that this is pre-release software and there will be bugs! Drop MacRabbit a line if you find any problems, and I hope you enjoy Espresso 2.0!