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BBEdit 14

barebones.com

51–60 of 164 posts

Re: BBEdit 14

#51

Can someone here explain to me the appeal of BBEdit? I’ve tried using it several times but it never clicked with me. (I’m an Emacs user.)

I've been using BBEdit since v4.0. One thing that sticks out for me was, way back in System 7 days, I opened up a huge (for the time) CSV text file to do some search/replace. I don't remember the size, but it was larger than available RAM on the machine, so maybe 20MB. It opened, and I was able to work on it.

Recently I had to open a 1GB text file in BBEdit to also do a search/replace. (Not something I could use the command line easily for, because I had to make executive decisions as to keep or replace what I found.) Worked flawlessly.

The application is ridiculously solid. Like emacs, it's very customizable. I have several wonko scripts written in PHP that I can use to munge data, but you can also use Applescript, or Perl, or whatever. Code snippets are great.

But the real appeal is, again, similar to emacs: once you get into the workflow and set your editor up the way you like, including keyboard shortcuts, layout, etc., you can become insanely productive. It becomes a personalized environment to such an extent that the thought of moving out is terrifying.

(Years ago, Bare Bones had a mail client called Mailsmith. It BBEdit-ized your mail client. I loved it, but email moved on and they didn't keep it up. I still miss it.)

Re: BBEdit 14

#52

Can someone here explain to me the appeal of BBEdit? I’ve tried using it several times but it never clicked with me. (I’m an Emacs user.)

In my own experience, it's a solid but outdatedly old-school code editor, but it shines spectacularly in text processing.

I always tend to use other editors as my daily driver (TextMate, Atom, VSCode, whatever the new flavor is), but I always keep BBEDit around and updated for this reason. Eventually I am going to need to open an enormous CSV or logfile and do things to it and BBEdit is there for me. It happily opens the thing where other apps scream and choke and die, and it has great text processing tools to do things with that data.

Another thing that's not my reason for liking it but is very real is it's incredible Macness. Unsurprisingly given its 30+ year history on the platform, it's an extremely well behaved Mac application that adheres very cleanly to Mac user expectations of behavior. Doesn't matter that much to me personally, but you'll find a lot of the old-school "fondly reminiscing about Mac SE/30s" types really appreciate that it just feels more like a Mac application than probably even a lot of the built in MacOS applications these days.

Re: BBEdit 14

#53
post #46

You gotta love how on their website they have the "Made with BBEdit" icon in the footer. https://www.barebones.com/images/BuiltWithBBEdit.jpg Brings back memories of when all websites did this and included Netscape/IE/etc icon banners.

Powered by WebObjects is my favorite

Re: BBEdit 14

#55
post #11

> We know that many of our customers create a lot of untitled documents for quick note-taking, and rely on BBEdit's legendary stability and robust crash recovery to protect their work. We've added a new "Notes" feature in BBEdit 14... Ooh, guilty as charged. I see an "Untitled text 931". It's a list of hostnames. "Untitled text 107" is a Beef & Broccoli recipe.

Lol! Same here.

I want them to have some paid lite mode, that I could purchase and support them. Given my use case I feel like $40 is a bit much but I’d gladly pay $20 for a note taking app.

Re: BBEdit 14

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's amazing to me that this wasn't a thing before Microsoft introduced it in VS Code. For what it's worth, the static analysis infrastructure we built for Dart was designed this way and, I think, existed slightly before LSP. We used it to provide a nice Dart IDE experience in the Dart Editor (a custom build of Eclipse), IntelliJ, Emacs, Vim, etc. without having to reimplement everything multiple times.

Cool stuff. I think there were a few similar efforts going on. For example, LSP was based on the protocol developed for OmniSharp, which was an open source .NET-specific implementation started in like 2013 by a Vim fanatic.

Interesting! Is there a source for that? I remember OmniSharp. It was a blessing when I could start to use vim when I had to use .NET a few years ago. I had no idea that's what LSP grew out of.

Re: BBEdit 14

#58
post #8

Thanks to using BBEdit for a decade now, I get bitterly disappointed whenever I re-open an application and it doesn't restore the windows and state it had when it closed. I've tried switching to both Emacs and Vim, but no amount of configuration nor third-party plugins could get them to work like this effectively. BBEdit works exactly how I want it to work out of the box, and I commend it for that.

Be careful what you wish for. I use one application which does not check whether the computer goes from 2 external monitors to the built-in laptop monitor. When I reopen the app on the laptop without the external monitors, all of its windows are drawn completely off the screen. The only way I know how to fix this is to reattach the external monitors, move the windows to the built-in screen, then close the app again.

Re: BBEdit 14

#59
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I've been using it for at least that long. I've tried "trendier" editors, from time to time, but always end up going back to BBEdit.

yap. not to forget TextWrangler

They rolled it in to BBEdit a couple of releases ago. TextWrangler is now effectively ‘BBEdit free mode’

Re: BBEdit 14

#60
I miss multiple cursor on non-contiguous text with BBEdit. I feel like this feature should be standard. I was blown by that feature when I saw it first on Sublime text.
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