Live data from Hacker News

BBEdit 14

barebones.com

131–140 of 164 posts

Re: BBEdit 14

#131
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this is the sort of thing where trust is lost after just once, never to be regained. Sort of like if someone lies to you, you can never trust them again, because they've done it once. I think think because software is so new, and the choices are still so slim, many are much more lenient than they would be with a human. However, as it matures, and there are more choices, we can regain the freedom to exclude an…

But like people, the circumstances matter. VSCode dropping the ball once has to be weighed against why it happened, what they were doing to prevent it from happening, etc. If it happened more, you’d lose trust in that feature, but it’s hard to leave something over a single feature that’s buggy. I can’t think of another text editor I’d rather be using.

For me, I don’t rely on this feature because I normally save anything that I want to keep for longer than a day. My PoV is that anything that isn’t backed up is already lost, so if it really matters, I need more than just hoping my software and hardware won’t fail. Dropping unreliable software is still always an improvement, but if I dropped every piece of software that ever failed me, I would have no software.

Re: BBEdit 14

#132
post #112

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.

That's worth something, but having a standard protocol is worth so much more. If your architecture had become the de-facto standard for this stuff, I can assure you that I'd be praising it instead.

Standard in what sense? Surely Dart has its specific requirements like any other language. I'm not convinced it's possible to standardize such functionality without limiting yourself to a subset of what you might want to have implemented.

Re: BBEdit 14

#134
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.

That's what I've been doing with Notepad++ for years and years. It doesn't even prompt you to save when you exit, it just restores your previous open file panes, including ones you didn't save. (not sure if I had to change a setting for this)

same here! i was going up to hundreds of new files for my notes. very comfortable!

Re: BBEdit 14

#135
post #18

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

One important differences is that Sublime Text is available on the principal dev platforms, BBEdit is Mac-only.

... is there another principal dev platform besides MacOS?

Re: BBEdit 14

#136
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.

I use Notepad++ like this too.

But I try to use its split pane feature to keep all my scratch txt files out of the way of whatever project files I need open.

Re: BBEdit 14

#137

Holy cow, this the same BBEdit I used as a teenager with System 7. Incredible. Makes me nostalgic for resource forks & resedit.

BBEdit was preinstalled on campus Macs when I was an engineering undergrad... in the mid-late 90s. I have made an entire software career, 25 years, since then, and still Rich Siegel soldiers on. Amazing.

Re: BBEdit 14

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO every program must work like this. I hate so much those "do you want to save this file" when I close a program. Don't ask me, just save it somewhere and restore when I open the program next time. It's trivial to implement and much easier to use.

> It's trivial to implement and much easier to use. ...unless you opened the document from a network share or removable media. Or serialization takes a long time. Or the storage device is slow. Or you don't have write permission in the file's original location and have to pull a potentially large file from somewhere to persist changes to some local position. Or the local storage device is full. A "always save" mechan…

You don't have to write in the same directory as the original file (and you definitely don't want to overwrite the original file). Original vi (and nvi) keeps the working copy below /var/tmp. If you can't write there, you have bigger problems.

(just be consistent from which host you modify a file from ;-}

Re: BBEdit 14

#139
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?

Isn’t that a native feature in MacOS? I never “lost saves” since years.

Re: BBEdit 14

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO every program must work like this. I hate so much those "do you want to save this file" when I close a program. Don't ask me, just save it somewhere and restore when I open the program next time. It's trivial to implement and much easier to use.

It was even better working on a system that versioned files automatically so programs didn't need to re-implement these sorts of wheels continually. Dave Cutler was right.

Only a minority of programs need that functionality. Databases and everything which implements transactions or version control itself, certainly don't. Neither all the temporary files, e.g. a compiler creates. If version control of your configuration files is external to the host (e.g. if some configuration management system like puppy, chef, etc. is used) then it's get in the way as well.

Dave Cutler was wearing his marketing hat when he claimed that such functionality belongs in the file system code. It would be nice, if it were in a library all interested applications could easily link to though.

Post reply on HN