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BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

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Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#121

Post by gattilorenz »

eviks wrote: post #76
labster wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, that's just your caricature of reality. Reality depends entirely on the reality of what the users asked for and the product.

I think you're reading this the wrong way, there's (literally!) decades of scientific literature about it, and it's not a problem of being condescending.

For a gentle non-scientific introduction: https://www.forbes.com/sites/leoyeykelis/2018/05/10/why-its-...

If you actually want to know more, a very accessible textbook: https://books.google.nl/books/about/Interaction_Design.html?...

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#122

Post by pr0zac »

akasakahakada wrote: post #31
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…

LOL kind of the same story as mind. 1. I want to change the highlight colour. It is too dim to recognize. People in the forum asked: hey I don't want hidden settings. Can you make the highlight colour adjustable? A: No. We won't do it. [1] [1] : https://groups.google.com/g/bbedit/c/yz_StJa9HVA 2. I forgot if it is the print function or what, it just don't have despite in the year of 2022. Oh wait maybe that is the fu…

If it’s export to pdf I’d think simply being on Mac solves that assuming it has print functionality. Is the issue the print functionality in MacOS can’t handle files as big as BBEdit can making using that sometimes impossible?

Or maybe it is actually a lack of print functionality and you’re remembering export to pdf cause it came up in that conversation?

I would test myself but I don’t have the app installed right now.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#125

Post by Asooka »

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…

Hah. VIM has had both soft and hard wrapping since forever and they're visually distinguished by the line numbers and line continuation marks in the gutter. I find it extremely useful, as I don't want to write overlong lines for commits &c, but do want to soft-wrap existing long lines where they are found.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#126

Post by galleywest200 »

sethd wrote: post #120
alwillis wrote: post #24

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…

> BBEdit is like an insurance policy just in case… I'm curious to understand how proprietary software can act as an insurance policy against open source software. I can understand how the reverse would be true.

It think OP means insurance in that they know how to use it well and can "fall back" to it if their current choice fails to meet their needs. I do not think they meant insurance as in failsafe/archival purposes/the company shutting down.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#127

Post by deltarholamda »

sethd wrote: post #120
alwillis wrote: post #24

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…

> BBEdit is like an insurance policy just in case… I'm curious to understand how proprietary software can act as an insurance policy against open source software. I can understand how the reverse would be true.

I think he means insurance in the sense that if he wants to use it (for whatever reason) it's there.

But BBEdit, while proprietary software, doesn't make proprietary files. They're just text files. So if BareBones went insane and turned BBEdit into a front-end for TikTok, your files will still just be text files. Even BBEdit's "Project" file is just a text file.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#129

Post by deltarholamda »

BareBones has had several good programs to go along with BBEdit.

Yojimbo is a kind of catch-all database where you can cram stuff and organize it. Kind of like a Pinterest for all kinds of things, not just images. With the family pack, everybody can have access to the same lump-o-stuff.

Way back in the day, they had Mailsmith, which was, more or less, a POP mail client with BBEdit crammed in. (This was back when pretty much all email was text and not HTML.) If you used email a lot, and needed to do clever things with it, it was fantastic. It never made the jump to IMAP AFAIK, so it kind of died out. I really liked it, but in today's world where a lot of email doesn't come multipart MIME, just HTML, it would be less useful.

But BBEdit is just great. Much like emacs, once you get immersed into the ecosystem, you find leaving it difficult. You end up with a collection of snippets and widgets and scripts and bits and bobs that become your workflow. And you can script all of it as well. It continues to chug along with ridiculously large files, even back when you might work on files bigger than the amount of RAM in your machine.

I'll remain a Mac user for as long as BBEdit works on it. While I can use other editors, if I have the choice I'll work in BBEdit.

Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

#130

Post by copperx »

nickm12 wrote: post #67
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 t…

The reason I fell in love with Emacs decades ago was because how it could do both kinds of wrapping so easily.
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