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BBEdit 14

barebones.com

81–90 of 164 posts

Re: BBEdit 14

#81
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.

Ugh, I do this with Notepad++ too, and I know it's terrible. But it's just so.... automatic. I tell myself that nothing in there is truly critical, but I've also had a few instances of being pretty pleased to be able to "find in all open documents" and recover a bit history of what I was doing, or URLs for some research, or whatever.

Re: BBEdit 14

#82
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visual Studio Code has yet to lose workspaces, untitled documents or unsaved changes for me. What is more likely to happen for me is accidentally running Git commands while I had buffers in VSCode with unsaved changes.

I ran into this issue [0] when updating VSCode which caused it to delete the contents of my unsaved/untitled document. [0] https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/69972

OK. So relying on unsaved buffers long-term might still be less safe than in BBEdit, assuming Microsoft hasn’t made improvements that prevent this sort of scenario from happening again.

However, it definitely wasn’t out of sheer negligence, as they do have tests that try to ensure unsaved data will make it from the last stable version to the current version at all times. Without doing any serious research, all I can say is that it is unfortunate, but if you don’t keep unsaved buffers and changes for long periods of time it is at least fairly safe...

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/test/smoke/src...

Re: BBEdit 14

#83

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.

> I was blown by that feature

Is the feature Premium? Or only available in free mode? Just wondering...

Re: BBEdit 14

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vim (cross-platform) supports ability to restore from the "swap" file (by default, AFAIK, but that may very well be a special configuration decision by my distro). If your system crashes or you lose power while editing foo.src, it will leave the swap file behind, which is eagerly written to disk while editing and only removed when the process shuts down gracefully. When you bring your system back up and try to edit f…

What is the performance cost of this sort of thing? I suppose it depends on how often it autosaves, but if it's too infrequent you end up loosing work anyway, and you could imagine it being a problem for files above a certain size.

Probably 25 years ago now, I've trained myself to habitually use "vim -n" for very large files for which recovery isn't required.

Re: BBEdit 14

#86
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.

This is the main reason BBEdit has been with me for a decade. I have NEVER lost an unsaved document during that whole time. You quit BBEdit or restart or crash macOS but they're always there when you're back in. Insanely robust. Is there anything like it on Linux?

Jetbrain's products have the concept of scratch files, of which I've made thousands over the years.

Re: BBEdit 14

#87
post #83

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.

> I was blown by that feature Is the feature Premium? Or only available in free mode? Just wondering...

It is available out of box. I was referring to "Quick Add Next". https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/multiple_selection_with_the...

Re: BBEdit 14

#88
post #50

Great, solid, reliable editor. Great documentation. And don't sleep on the diff tool bbdiff. For text diffing it's pretty fucking good.

This is prominent among many reasons why I’ve kept BBEdit installed on all my Macs since the mid-‘90s, even after most of my development workflow shifted to zsh-nvim-tmux

Re: BBEdit 14

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vim (cross-platform) supports ability to restore from the "swap" file (by default, AFAIK, but that may very well be a special configuration decision by my distro). If your system crashes or you lose power while editing foo.src, it will leave the swap file behind, which is eagerly written to disk while editing and only removed when the process shuts down gracefully. When you bring your system back up and try to edit f…

What is the performance cost of this sort of thing? I suppose it depends on how often it autosaves, but if it's too infrequent you end up loosing work anyway, and you could imagine it being a problem for files above a certain size.

The swap file stores edits rather than the whole file. I guess this could be laggy if you were doing global substitutions on a massive log file, say, but I've never had an issue. Vim was written for much slower computers.

Re: BBEdit 14

#90
post #40
post #18

Saw this editor names several times before, but never used it. Out of curiosity, how does it compare to Sublime Text?

I haven't used BBEdit in over a decade, so my sense of its capabilities are surely out of date. I can't compare features, but I can tell an interesting story. Sublime Text is arguably a spiritual descendant of BBEdit. Sublime Text (starting with version 2) was heavily inspired by TextMate. In fact it used TextMate file formats for colorschemes and snippets, making it relatively easy for TextMate users to migrate to S…

> TextMate, in turn, was heavily inspired by BBEdit.

This assertion is surprising. They're not all alike in any way that any two Mac-native text editors wouldn't be. Sublime is markedly different only because it dispenses with Mac-native UI conventions (which IHMO makes it unpleasant to use on macOS).

> BBEdit at the time was, as its name suggests, fairly bare-bones. It had auto-indent and syntax highlighting and very sophisticated grep capabilities, but not much else in terms of programming support. For a long time, it was THE code editor for mac users who wanted a graphical interface but not an IDE. TextMate rose to popularity by mostly mimicking BBEdit, but offering additional programming features like snippets and shell-script based plugins and more sophisticated syntax highlighting (enabling e.g. correctly highlighting CSS and JS embedded in an HTML file).

This seems not quite accurate.

My recollection is that BBEdit was just another Mac plaintext editor app -- solid, but stodgy -- until the Web arrived, and someone built a suite of HTML editing commands for it. That's when it took off. It was the plaintext editor everyone used for HTML until TextMate came along.

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