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BBEdit 14

barebones.com

141–150 of 164 posts

Re: BBEdit 14

#141
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.

I see a lot of "oh, but this is what a lot of editors do" comments. But BBEdit 14's Notes feature is not "we save untitled files"; it's a little more like the Notes app, or like a more limited version of Ulysses's sheets. It's explicitly about saving documents that you don't bother to give titles to. Also, a neat trick BBEdit has had since version 13, I think: it can actually recover untitled documents even after you…

uh, what? that does not sound like a feature to me - I expect that when I close a document without saving it is gone for good. Is there a way to turn that off?

Re: BBEdit 14

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm utterly unrestrained with it because I don't even use NP++ as a text editor for anything else— my actual projects are in VSCode or just terminal vim instances.

Re: BBEdit 14

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Emacs. Emacs will autosave every 300 keystrokes or 30 seconds of idle time. You can also configure it because well its Emacs. Has saved my butt on numerous occasions. It will not reload your session by default but you can do that if you want.

+1 for Emacs autosave. Note that an autosave file is not the original file you were working on but a copy saved at the interval you specify. The original file is left untouched until you explicitly save it.

In case Emacs aborts for some reason, at restart Emacs will alert you that the newer copy exists and ask if you want to use the copy instead, which you usually (but not always) do.

If you want Emacs to automatically save the original file after a configurable interval, use auto-save-visited-mode.

Re: BBEdit 14

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a lot of "oh, but this is what a lot of editors do" comments. But BBEdit 14's Notes feature is not "we save untitled files"; it's a little more like the Notes app, or like a more limited version of Ulysses's sheets. It's explicitly about saving documents that you don't bother to give titles to. Also, a neat trick BBEdit has had since version 13, I think: it can actually recover untitled documents even after you…

uh, what? that does not sound like a feature to me - I expect that when I close a document without saving it is gone for good. Is there a way to turn that off?

Absolutely. (...checking preferences to make sure I am not lying) Yes! Absolutely. :) You can turn the feature off completely, and if it's enabled, you can set a time limit for "rescued" items before they're completely discarded, e.g., yo could set it so you have a day to rescue them, then they get truly deleted.

Re: BBEdit 14

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Databases and everything which implements transactions or version control itself, certainly don't.

Why should programs implement these themselves? It should be part of the OS.

Re: BBEdit 14

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Databases and everything which implements transactions or version control itself, certainly don't. Why should programs implement these themselves? It should be part of the OS.

I don't think you can get Oracle, IBM, etc. to agree on how a database ought to be implemented. It clearly depends on the use case as well. More fundamentally one can argue, that what can be implemented in userspace ought to be implemented in userspace (for security and maintenance reasons alone), rather than the kernel. And what good does a db do in a compute node?

Re: BBEdit 14

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

There have been a lot of scenarios where blowing away everything since the last save and reverting to known-good via the Open command has saved my ass.

The solution I think works best is to flash/blink the Save button when a file has changed. And ask them to save when they leave. Then, the user is more easily reminded to save when they feel it is most appropriate to do so, but is not compelled into saving and can revert to a previous version if they like.

Re: BBEdit 14

#148
post #132
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Standard in the sense that most languages and most editors have adopted it: https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/impleme...

Re: BBEdit 14

#149

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 switched to BBEdit after 10 years of being an emacs user. The main reason was I could actually use all the features of BBEdit, versus emacs where I could never remember the commands. BBEdit also had commands for most of the text transformations where I would have to break out elisp or go looking for someone else who had solved the problem. Eventually features like code folding and editing files over SSH locked me in for good.

The main issue over the years was that BBEdit's support as a code editor was never as good as emacs. Syntax coloring was anemic and it couldn't indent lines etc. I'll have to try out the LSP support because that might address that issue.

Re: BBEdit 14

#150
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the release notes yet. I've always thought that Bare Bones' release notes read like a love letter to their customers. I love the little bits of humor and personal touches in them too.
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