81–90 of 137 posts
Nobody has mentioned the manual. It is fantastic! To this day I still open the BBEdit manual (to chapter 30, maybe?) if I want to figure out how to write some Regex. I’ve never seen such clear and comprehensive instructions on Regex anywhere else.
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…
While I drifted away from BBEdit for coding a while ago, BBEdit 14’s LSP support has pulled me back to some degree. I put together a decent Elixir package for it and, to my own mild surprise, like it more than Panic Nova or Doom Emacs. (Nova has tremendous potential, but it feels like it’s still tripping over its own shoelaces a little too often.)
Nobody has mentioned the manual. It is fantastic! To this day I still open the BBEdit manual (to chapter 30, maybe?) if I want to figure out how to write some Regex. I’ve never seen such clear and comprehensive instructions on Regex anywhere else.
Completely agree. One of the best software manuals ever written. And I too refer to the Regex chapter. I believe John Gruber wrote a significant portion of the manual back in the late 1990s
But BBEdit is so good and has been such a key part of my livelihood for decades that I gladly pay to upgrade every time a new major version comes out, even if I don't need any of the new features.
That's the way to keep revenue coming without subscription extortion: make something genuinely useful that people truly like using.
TextMate and BBEdit.
TextMate is no longer supported (if I remember correctly).
But BBEdit is still going strong.
To this day, BBEdit's diff utility is still my favorite.
Also, BBEdit always provided free, incredible and comprehensive user manual PDF.
I, too, have been using this delightful editor since the early 1990's -- once known as TextWrangler. Still going strong! Their mission statement is spot on: We don’t have investors to impress, so we don’t need a “mission statement.” We enjoy writing and shipping great products that address the needs of ourselves and our customers.
TextWrangler was a spin-off product giving some of BBEdit for free
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…
Companies with solid products and solid support really stand out.
It was also 30 years old last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31008290
(Submitted title was "BBEdit is 30 years old")
Edit: some people didn't like "BBEdit is 31 years old" so I took another crack at changing it.
Edit edit: never mind.
Edit edit edit: never never mind.