BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due • Hacker News Board

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#61

Post by cat_plus_plus » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 4:00 AM UTC

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.

Really? I though CodeWarrior for PalmOS was a champ compared to Visual C++ for embedded platforms. Lets start with a fully functional and bug free compiler with standard library and all features working.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#62

Post by phanimahesh » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 4:05 AM UTC

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]

I'm somehat worried about the incidental harm caused by people relying on GPT's word chain hallucinations as facts for something critical.

Most laypersons don't understand that GPT is not a factual search engine. I'm increasingly seeing people who should know better also forget this now and then.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#63

Post by zarzavat » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 4:08 AM UTC

labster wrote: post #60

eviks wrote: post #57

> 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.)" That's not utmost respect, but condescension when you think you always know /can figure out better than the us…

No that’s just reality. If you give the user exactly what they asked for, you shipped a bad product.

In other words, you built “The Homer”

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#64

Post by iampivot » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 5:01 AM UTC

An inline search pane would be nice. Not because it's necessarily better, but it aligns with a lot of other tools that we use.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#65

Post by Y-bar » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 5:09 AM UTC

iampivot wrote: post #64

An inline search pane would be nice. Not because it's necessarily better, but it aligns with a lot of other tools that we use.

v11 and v12 had that, did they remove it?

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#66

Post by teo_zero » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 5:22 AM UTC

selcuka wrote: post #51

criddell wrote: post #12

> 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 i…

> 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. True, but it's also necessary. As Henry Ford (supposedly) famously said "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

I've always thought this anecdote about Henry Ford is misleading, if not utterly false. In most cases giving people what you think is best for them and not what they ask for, results in a completely failure. Only a small percentage of cases actually leads to a groundbreaking new technology. But our memory is biased: we only tell success stories and forget the failures...

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#67

Post by nickm12 » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 5:22 AM UTC

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…

Heh. I just looked up an exchange I had with Bare Bones support from 2001 (!) about the hard-wrap-as-you-type feature. This was an early BBE feature that was removed when they added soft wrapping.

I tried to argue for this feature but was politely refused. The argument was: "It is not so much that the code can not co-exist as that the combination of user experiences causes confusion. The two states (hard wrap while typing) and soft wrapping have the same visual result and would tend to cause considerable confusion. Because of this we removed the first when we added the second."

It's 22 years later and the feature has not been restored. I wonder how many times its been refused.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#68

Post by perilunar » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 5:30 AM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #3

Never read an article inside the App Store. That's a first.

Same. It's weird because the article link opens the same article in both the browser and in the App Store app, which seems redundant.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#69

Post by shusaku » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 5:32 AM UTC

tiffanyh wrote: post #34

UltraEdit I never understood why there was so much love for BBEdit on Mac and so little love for UltraEdit on Windows. They were both released around the same time, selling to the same audience just on different platforms. This was also during a time where there was many options.

Much like iOS seems to drive app sales better than android, in the old days Macs had the best shareware

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#70

Post by BlackFingolfin » Tue, Jun 13, 2023, 5:37 AM UTC

ggm wrote: post #48

I never used it, but I certainly had to support web devs who did, and who needed me to open up FTP to the website so they could integrated-upload their markup. There were a bunch of "does it do PASV" conversations. Because, FTP is sufficiently old-school (like telnet) that it believed in archaisms of how to open a distinct data port to a command port, and it made firewalls very unhappy unless you could use "passive m…

I think you may be mixing up some memories? tortoiseCVS was (is?) a Windows product and has nothing to do with BBEdit (which only runs on MacOS). I don't recall BBEdit ever imposing restrictions on CVS repositories (and I used it extensively with those for a decade, though only since about 1999).

I am also confused by what point you are trying to make regarding FTP? "Web devs wanted to upload files via FTP" sounds pretty normal for a website 15-20 years ago? Of course it also unclear when your story takes place...