BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due

It does indeed have working print functionality. As you say, it's on macOS and so this automatically means it has PDF export.

I'll admit I've never used said print functionality, so I can't rule out that it's missing something that some people consider important.

I really wish they or someone would turn Yojimbo into a scientific papers PDF organizer/reader, or at least have some support for this. Papers was good but got bloated and the standalone is not supported anymore

I pretty much stopped using bbedit when moving over to osx from system9. It had the ability to run emacs (there were some emacs ports for pre osx mac, but they all annoyed me in one way or another) and that was a nice return 'home' for me. I remember having to work on a project on a windows machine in the early aughts that drove me nut until someone handed me notepad++ and called it 'bbedit for windows'.

That all said, nice of apple to write a little puff piece about it and it's author. BBedit was a workhorse for many and continues to be for many. It's one of the few very successful mac apps that apple didn't just steal (like watson).

> (Not 'How can we give them what they’re asking for?' because that isn’t the right question to answer.)

We say some very similar variant of this where I currently work, and also at previous places. Personally, I've never been able to understand this in any other way than:

a.) our users are idiots, we developers know much better then those poor souls

b.) our users are idiots, adding a feature without taking away a marginally-similar feature would be so confusing for them, poor souls

And I think it's why BBEdit gets this historical puff piece that reads like an in-flight magazine piece congratulating Madonna on still being able to dance at this late stage of her career.

I used BBEdit 1.0, and probably every version after that -- including the OpenDoc component[1] version!! -- but I finally stopped paying for it after version 13, after realizing I only ever used it for dealing with my Japanese bank's legacy-encoding CSV files. (Which I still do, to be fair, but the free version works for this.)

I don't think BBEdit has maintained legitimate relevance, in terms of writing most kinds of code, or even more complex text-processing workflows (for which it is better-suited relative to coding), and IMHO that's basically because of this attitude of "our users are dumb! we must protect them, poor little lambs!"

For instance, despite having had rectangular selection quite early, when it was rare (20 years ago? memories get hazy...), I don't think they ever made the jump to Sublime-style multiple cursors and discontiguous selections/insertion-points (later made 9 quintillion times more popular by VS Code) -- arguably the most significant advance in text editors since the introduction of multiple windows.

Likewise language servers and basically everything since 2013 or so.

I might be wrong, though; I look at text editors from the writer-of-software perspective, mainly. TFA references people using BBEdit to write English, and as that endeavor has gotten more complicated ("just write it in Markdown" somebody once said to my father, and he threw a spiny squash at their head) maybe BBEdit's niche has shifted. I don't think it is relevant today as a source code editor, but maybe as a blog post editor, or applied statistics prompt editor, etc?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc

I cannot give you a specific example in this case, because I don’t know the feature, use case and problem… which is kinda the issue at hand. But the claim that “users are familiar with other apps, we should give them the exactly same features if they ask for it” is not very sound: first of all, not all users will be familiar with other editors. Those familiar might have had a very hard time learning them at first. And, in general, it’s good to ask “why do you want that? Show me how you use it and why you think it’s important, and we can test multiple design alternatives until we found something that works for you”, instead of “let me add feature X from editor Y” (both because there would be no innovation, but also no reason to change editors).

For the article, the relevant part was: “ In general, a researcher will first ask a customer to walk through how they currently solve a particular problem. As part of this investigation, they will probe at the user’s pain points and existing workarounds”. What is the hard wrapping used for? Maybe there’s a better way of solving the same problem to begin with, and hard wrapping is just a band-aid instead of the proper solution to the underlying goal?

By the way, UX research doesn’t claim that designers cannot get anything wrong or that users can never get anything’s right - that’s a silly simplification of course. But I don’t think the the BBEdit author was trying to promote such an absolutist view.