51–60 of 137 posts
I’d be really interested in reading a history of the codebase: from classic Mac Toolbox to whatever it looks like today. Is it still mostly C? A weird mishmash of C, C++, Obj-C, and Swift? What UI toolkit does it use?
I’ve been using it for most of those years, and still use it every day. We recently had to wrangle a bunch of 400Mb+ XML files, and everyone else’s editor struggled even to open them, while I happily regexed my way around extracting various data. However, I reluctantly have to say that when working with TypeScript codebases specifically, I do feel the lack of IDE features for recognizing imports and cross-referencing…
absolutely use this on a regular basis - congratulations "boston" edit!
Text transformations can be done via regex, predefined functions, or any scripting language, where the scripts will be listed in the menu.
Regex search/replace has a history of used patterns, so you can reuse them.
All in all, it is a very lightweight editor with excellent text transformation features that no other editor can offer.
I use VS Code for coding, Emacs as a Lisp machine and its macro recorder for repetitive tasks, and BBEdit for all other text transformation tasks.
My late `09 Mac Mini blew up a few years ago. I had a spare one a friend gave me that I fired up and when I sent an email to the BBEDit folks asking if could download and unlock that version they gave it to me without any hesitation. All they asked for was my email address. Same with the folks at "Fetch". Adobe basically told to piss off when I asked for a copy of the version of Photoshop I'd paid for. I downloaded a…
When it came time recently to start from scratch when I purchased a new (used) MacBook Pro, I finally just caved on the license.
One of those I told myself I'd 'purchase when I had the money eventually' and actually did, heh. Zero regrets.
BBEdit was one of the best apps on my very first Mac in 1995, and I've been using it ever since. No other software I use has more years of service under its belt. 68k, PowerPC, Intel, ... — that alone is such a rare achievement. I don't know any other commercial software with such a track record. They will pry it from my cold, dead hands once I'm gone.
I read about BBEdit on HN a few months ago and realized it has one use-case where it excels: text transformation and regex search/replace across files. When it comes to this, no other editor I know can hold water: neither Sublime, nor VS Code, nor Vim. And forget about Emacs, as regexes need to be awkwardly double or triple backslashed. Text transformations can be done via regex, predefined functions, or any scriptin…
I'd be surprised if vim couldn't do it as a command. After doing a search, what did surprise me was Vim having it's own Fandom wiki. Maybe extreme Vim commanding will be the next popular livestreaming topic.
Still a great program. Better than the garbage built-in TextEdit, way faster than something like VSCode.