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BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product

barebones.com

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Re: BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product

#71

Post by klodolph »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #5

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?

$ otool -L BBEdit | sed 's#.*/\(.*\) (.\*#\1#'

BBEdit (architecture x86_64): libz.1.dylib libbz2.1.0.dylib Accelerate AppKit CrashReporter ApplicationServices AudioToolbox Automator Carbon CoreAudio Quartz DiskArbitration Intents IOKit QuickLook Security SystemConfiguration UserNotifications WebKit CandiedYams Titlecase UpdateKit Foundation libobjc.A.dylib libc++.1.dylib libSystem.B.dylib CFNetwork CoreFoundation CoreGraphics CoreServices CoreText ImageIO QuartzCore

Looks like Objective-C, C++, AppKit, some other bits and pieces. QuartzCore has Core Animation in it which can either be used to create flashy animations or be used to create some very solid, high-performance text views (if that’s how you use it).

Re: BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product

#72

Post by KerrAvon »

lillywastaken wrote: post #51
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #5

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 believe it's still mostly C, and it definitely uses some custom text field stuff. If it were using the Cocoa textfield it would have smooth scrolling, but BBEdit still retains line-by-line scrolling.

BBEdit can (and always could) read text files significantly larger than RAM without thrashing VM. This has always required a custom text engine, first because it was the only way to do that, and more recently I assume it still provides highest performance.

Re: BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product

#73

Post by seanw444 »

3by7 wrote: post #16
shp0ngle wrote: post #12

Ahh that gets me nostalgic for the pre-VSCode days. How is TextMate doing these days? I know they spent forever for TextMate 2.0, and that somehow fizzled out...?

Textmate 2.0 got open-sourced https://github.com/textmate/textmate but it looks pretty much abandoned/finished.

https://github.com/CodeEditApp/CodeEdit

Looks promising for you MacOS users.

Re: BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product

#74

Post by yelling_cat »

submeta wrote: post #55

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…

That was the killer BBEdit feature for me, back when I was building my first static web sites. Making precise global layout changes without using a web template system felt like magic.

Re: BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product

#75

Post by KerrAvon »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #27
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TM 2 was great, albeit somewhat abandoned, until Apple Silicon came along. There’s some sort of bug in the app that makes it regularly hang on launch on my M1 and M1 Max laptops.

Works fine on both my M1 machines, never seen this happen once. Maybe try a fresh install and transitioning over your settings bit by bit.

You don't get the SPOD at startup while it tries to replay every FSEvent that's ever happened?

Seriously, if that could get fixed, I'd still use TM, it's my favorite editor. But I can't even look at the sources because they're GPL3.

Re: BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product

#76

Post by rvense »

KerrAvon wrote: post #72
lillywastaken wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it's still mostly C, and it definitely uses some custom text field stuff. If it were using the Cocoa textfield it would have smooth scrolling, but BBEdit still retains line-by-line scrolling.

BBEdit can (and always could) read text files significantly larger than RAM without thrashing VM. This has always required a custom text engine, first because it was the only way to do that, and more recently I assume it still provides highest performance.

When it started, the native text editing on the Mac was limited to 32K chunks! Need anything more, you could start with the raw APIs that lay out a single line of text and do it by hand.

Re: BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product

#78

Post by tzs »

I mainly edit in vim in a terminal, but when I feel like a GUI I used BBEdit.

I also use when I'm trying to understand someone else's code. I like its multi-file search better than anything else I've tried. When you do a multi-file search in BBEdit (or a single file search if you use the "Find All" command) it opens up a search results window split horizontally into two panes.

The top pane shows all the matching lines, grouped by file. You can collapse the matches for any given file.

When you select a line in the results pane an editor opens in the bottom pane for the file containing that line, with the cursor on that line. You can make changes if you want there or in the regular editing window that the file is in or both.

You can have multiple multi-file search results windows open. I might be looking at a function in a file, do a multi-file search to find all mentions of that, and then while looking at a caller in another file see something that needs changing, and start doing that right in the bottom pane of the results. While doing that I might need to check something else out, do a second search for that, see something that needs fixing there, and do that from that results window's bottom pane.

Re: BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product

#79

Post by GoofballJones »

oblib wrote: post #33

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…

Long LOOOONG ago, I had a good relationship with Adobe. For instance, I was one of the beta-testers for Photoshop 3.0 (which was the first to do native CMYK). Would talk with them all the time over the phone.

But those guys have long since left the company and the "bean counters" took over the company and it has been downhill ever since. I too will never give them another dime. I don't mind their products, I just can't abide the management and company.

I've had the same experience as you did with BareBones though. They always came through for me with BBEdit. I told them one time they have a customer for life, and I've kept that promise.

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