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BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

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Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#21

Post by alwillis »

miles wrote: post #13

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 TextWrangle…

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

BBEdit is incredibly scriptable and extensible. You could have written a short script in AppleScript, Perl, Ruby, Python, etc. to perform this task without leaving BBEdit.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#22

Post by chipotle_coyote »

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!

I know Patrick Woolsey is still there. I don't think the company has ever been that big.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#23

Post by vr46 »

I have fond memories of writing HTML with it, and various other things, but I almost never use it anymore. The regex playground is awesome but I never think to use it, even though I still keep a licensed copy around.

I use Neovim a lot more and then perhaps VSCode, as I live in a world with a lot more going on and a lot more integration with other tools, a very different world to that which makes BBEdit a go-to app. Also, I don’t think it’s that impressive with large files. Still, gotta respect a hit.

Power to Rich Siegel.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#24

Post by alwillis »

I haven't used BBEdit regularly since I discovered Vim (and now Neovim) 10+ years ago, allowing my license to lapse. But I couldn't resist the 30th anniversary sale to purchase the latest version for $30.

The UI hasn't changed much, which is both good and not so good.

Neovim will continue to be my daily driver but I'm glad to support a small, local (to where I live) developer who's been making great Mac software for a long time.

BBEdit is like an insurance policy just in case…

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#25

Post by miles »

alwillis wrote: post #21
miles wrote: post #13

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 TextWrangle…

> Since then, I've purchased BBEdit licenses, but use other editors when I need to hard wrap text to window width. BBEdit is incredibly scriptable and extensible. You could have written a short script in AppleScript, Perl, Ruby, Python, etc. to perform this task without leaving BBEdit.

[flagged]

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#27

Post by e28eta »

Lots of love for BBEdit. I appreciate it as a long-lived, native Mac text editor. It hasn’t stagnated, instead incrementally improving for decades.

Discovering the command line tools was a very good day for me. I really like the built-in (two way) diff, and it’s my $EDITOR of choice on mac.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#28

Post by tantalor »

miles wrote: post #25
alwillis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since then, I've purchased BBEdit licenses, but use other editors when I need to hard wrap text to window width. BBEdit is incredibly scriptable and extensible. You could have written a short script in AppleScript, Perl, Ruby, Python, etc. to perform this task without leaving BBEdit.

[flagged]

Okay let's just take GPT's word for it.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#29

Post by BooneJS »

By the time I switched to Mac it was already MacOS X Jaguar and it had vi which I was used to. I didn’t buy my first BBEdit license until 2 years ago (!!) thanks to a blog post I read. It’s a great editor. I’ve always liked macOS because it felt like the Linux I use at work, but BBEdit is a great reason to not run vim fullscreen.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#30

Post by thaumaturgy »

Ohh, BBEdit. I've long since moved on from the Mac platform, but I still have really fond memories of it and wish more text editors could match it (SublimeText is pretty good too).

I remember when BBEdit came out. It was revolutionary at the time. It was a fun challenge to find "large" files to test it on, and for a while nobody was sure how it did the magic it did.

It shipped with a really clean UI and it gave me my introduction to regular expressions. Its "light" theme is still so good that I occasionally try to clone it into environments (unsuccessfully).

When Mac development shifted from the THINK ecosystem over towards Metrowerks, CodeWarrior's IDE was such a pig that you'd figure out how to do the editing in BBEdit and the debugging and compiling in MWCW.

BBEdit also shipped with a rare (again, at the time) ability to open and juggle loooooots of windows, and with a little bit of Applescript we'd try to open an entire directory of files just to see if we could make it faceplant. It almost never did.

I have a huge amount of respect for Rich and having stuck to doing one thing and one thing well for so long. (Well, kinda. TextWrangler was okay, and MailSmith was pretty good but got sold.)

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