Bespin 0.9a2 offers fixes and a couple of features for users of Bespin Embedded and the Bookmarklet. In this post, I’ll also talk about what’s happening in the Skywriter transition.

The most important change in Bespin 0.9a2 (download it now) is that it restores compatibility with Chrome. Chrome 6 included a change that broke a library used by Bespin.

Bespin Embedded now has a jslint_command plugin which adds a (you guessed it!) “jslint” command. Running this command will run jslint on the code you’re editing and tell you if it spots any problems. If you make a build with the “notifier” and “gritter_notify”, you can even get a popup message when you run jslint and your file has
errors.

Also new is a “specialmodules” setting. If you’re editing CommonJS modules and the module name entered matches a regex contained in “specialmodules”, a special syntax highlighting tag (“specialmodule”) is added. This makes it possible to differentiate to your users which modules are provided by your system and which are their own.

The Bookmarklet has been updated to include the “diff” syntax highlighter, which is useful if you are the type of person who reviews patches on the web.

As announced a few weeks ago, the Bespin project is being renamed “Skywriter”. We are working on stabilizing APIs, simplifying some code and creating new JavaScript-based build tooling. The first release branded as Mozilla Skywriter will be a 1.0 alpha release, and as we head to a 1.0 final we’ll want to be sure that the APIs
will be stable. In a few days, plenty of new opportunities to help out on the project
will arise, so head over to the skywriter-core mailing list if you’d like to help make Skywriter the best editor around.

&emdash; Kevin Dangoor on behalf of the Mozilla Developer Tools team