Workarounds for Font Glitches in BBEdit 12.0.1

[UPDATE: Wow, Rich Siegel of Bare Bones replied to my email within a few hours — on Thanksgiving morning! See the updates below.]

Issues in BBEdit 12.0.1:

  • If I change the default font using BBEdit > Preferences… > Editor Defaults > Default font: > Select…, the display of currently open documents doesn't change. They keep using the old font, even if I resize the window to force the text layout to update. (This "nudging" used to be needed in older versions of BBEdit to get font changes to get applied to open documents.) Newly opened files do use the new font preference.

    • Workaround: either relaunch BBEdit or close documents and reopen them.
    • UPDATE: This is fixed in 12.0.2. I thought I had reproduced the bug in the beta of 12.0.2 but was mistaken.

  • If I open the Font Panel with ⌘T (View > Text Display > Show Fonts) instead of through Preferences, I can modify the font of the currently open document — but only that document. Same Font Panel, different effect. Furthermore, that particular document is stuck with that font across launches, because the association between font and file is remembered in ~/Library/BBEdit/Document State.plist. As far as I can tell there's no UI for telling that file to revert to the default font preference.

    • Workaround: quit BBEdit, delete Document State.plist, and relaunch.
    • UPDATE: Persistent per-document fonts are actually a feature. The UI I had missed was the Edit > Normalize Options… menu item, which changes the document back to using your Preferences settings.

I've reported these to Bare Bones. They've always been responsive to my issue reports. If I'm missing something they'll let me know, presumably after the Thanksgiving holiday.

One thought on “Workarounds for Font Glitches in BBEdit 12.0.1

  1. I've been a BBEdit user for more years than I can remember, but this version has been the buggiest by far regarding, mostly regarding font-related issues leading to crashes and apparently wiped out preferences. Love that Rich himself responded to me on the ones I reported. Thanks for the "Edit > Normalize Options" tip!

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