Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

apps.apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 177 posts

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#11

Post by im_down_w_otp »

girvo wrote: post #6
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #4

BBEdit was an essential component of not having to deal with the terrible editor & even worse runtime stability of CodeWarrior for a spell in a past life of mine. Thank you, BBEdit. Also, you’re low-key responsible for my lifelong unrealized quest to give my Linux workstation sane keyboard shortcuts.

> CodeWarrior Oh heck, you've just dredged up some absolutely horrific repressed memories of that pile of junk. It was impressive how unstable it was. It's funny too, these days I'm in embedded development again, and it's a markedly different experience to those days, though still amusingly unstable at times too.

Back in the good ol’ days of no memory protection on the Mac and the fun of trying to figure out if it was you or your dev environment that just unrecoverably hosed the system state.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#12

Post by criddell »

> We've always had the utmost respect for the user. Every internal decision about look and function answers the auestions "What does the customer need?" and "How can we help them be more productive?" (Not "How can we give them what they're asking for?" because that isn't the right question to answer.)

That’s hard to do and I would guess that their ability to distinguish between what users ask for and what they need is a big part of the software’s longevity.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#13

Post by miles »

FTA: "We’ve always had the utmost respect for the user. Every internal decision about look and function answers the questions 'What does the customer need?' and 'How can we help them be more productive?' (Not 'How can we give them what they’re asking for?' because that isn’t the right question to answer.)"

I experienced this first hand when asking Rich to restore the "hard wrap to window width" feature in TextWrangler[1] (it had also been removed from BBEdit).

He quickly and kindly replied that while "We don't have any plans to restore the 'Window Width' option for hard wrapping" I could "describe how this would be useful to you" for him to "give it some thought".

I simply downgraded to restore the desired functionality, as I did not want to waste the author's time arguing over the utility of a feature that had been included for ages.

Since then, I've purchased BBEdit licenses, but use other editors when I need to hard wrap text to window width.

[1] https://tinyapps.org/blog/201807150700_hard_wrap_window_widt...

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#14

Post by keyle »

aduffy wrote: post #8

BBEdit was my first text editor ~15 years ago! Back when I was really obsessive over the small stuff because I wanted to be like the cool kids. I then got into Text Wrangler, vim, emacs, nvim, etc. over the years. I was really into customizing my environment. Now I just use IntelliJ and VSCode. Don't really have to think about it, plugin system has grown enormously, and I rarely need to spend time futzing with my con…

Kind of the same here. You know they've added LSP support to BBEdit recently and if you wanted a native solution... Well it does 95% of it all.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#16

Post by favorited »

no_wizard wrote: post #2

Wait, the impression I'm getting here is BBEdit is just Rich Siegel now? Does Barebones not have any other engineers working on BBEdit? Somewhat surprising, but props to Rich, that is some impressive work, above what I already thought was impressive work!

Sounds pretty bare-bones to me!

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#17

Post by keyle »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #15

That must be a few years old. It’s been more than 30 years, since BBEdit was released. I use it a lot. I never warmed to any of the alternatives.

I remember Coda was good when it first came out! ... and then, well, that went sideways.

It really takes an exceptional product to last eons and remain relevant.

BBEdit feels more like a product of love than oriented for-profit.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#18

Post by jen729w »

tslater2006 wrote: post #10
coolandsmartrr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not?

Guessing they meant "I have never read" and not telling you to "never read"

I find myself writing like this all the time. I omit the 'I', writing it like I say it.

Then I read back my own words and invariably insert the 'I' as I realise it doesn't make sense.

Post reply on HN