BBEdit is my Mac version of the "Notepad.ext". Been a user for over a decade by now and still love it, albeit after macOS Monterey upgrade it has become significantly slower in app loading time (from a fraction of second to 1-2 seconds sometimes, irregardless of the size of the files that were previous opened of the number of files previously opened, less than 10 usually for me)
So I guess I used BBEdit for 28 years. I started on System 7? I think. And I finally stopped last year when I switched to CotEditor, wanting something more macOS native.
It's still installed, though. I was mildly annoyed that I paid for a version 14 license and then about 6 months later version 15 came out and my license didn't work in it.
It's probably still worth the money, but I'm enjoying CotEditor for my basic text editing needs.
Edit: My version numbers may be confused. Whatever they are, my license only worked for less than a year. I did ask support if I qualified for the next version, and they said no.
My needs are very basic, so I didn't give Sublime much of a look. I specifically wanted something macOS native, and CotEditor was one of the few, possibly the only, that supports Versions. It does everything I need it to.
> I was mildly annoyed that I paid for a version 14 license and then about 6 months later version 15 came out
The current version of BBEdit is 14.1. Maybe you're getting the version numbers confused here. (BBEdit 14 came out in mid-July of 2021, and while a version 13 license would indeed not work in it because new versions require new licenses, the web site clearly states you can upgrade from BBEdit 13 for free if you bought it on or after January 1, 2021. IIRC, Bare Bones has always been fairly generous in this kind of upgrade policy.)
> And I finally stopped last year when I switched to CotEditor, wanting something more macOS native.
BBEdit has always been a native Mac program, so I'm not sure what it is you're trying to get at here?
If you quit BBEdit it'll restore the state to where it was when you left. It recovers documents after crashes. You can even turn on an option that lets you recover "untitled" documents that you explicitly clicked the "Don't Save" button on. I suppose BBEdit isn't literally saving to the open file as you go, so if that's actually what you want, it's a strike against it. I'd have to put some effort into actually losing data with BBEdit, though, and I think on balance I'd prefer "don't let me lose unsaved changes unintentionally but still let me close a file without saving or revert to the version on disk if I confirm that's what I actually want to do".
By "Versions" I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but BBEdit integrates with the Mac's native file versioning at a level that I don't think I've seen any other editor do. You can select "Search > Find Differences > Compare Against Previous Version" and get a diff just the way you would if you were comparing versions in Git or Subversion.
I love CotEditor too, it has basic Markdown's syntax highlighting which is all I need to take daily notes. It also has a CLI with args to jump to specific line and column which I use in combination with FZF to search and jump to matches in my notes.
I'm amused that we've gotten to the point where BBEdit no longer feels native because it's so old and clunky and everything else has a more slick, modern design.
I remember naming a function that sanitized sketchy (in the charset sense) email content “zap_gremlins” — this was about a decade ago, and probably about a decade after the last time I used BBEdit. I’m a Sublime guy now but fond memories.
And in the newest edition the converse option "Precompose Unicode", when Word once again decides that there shouldn't be any national characters and produces composed sequences that won't render in the browser with custom fonts. (It's pretty much as essential as "Zap Gremlins" had been – and about as god-sent, especially for work in multi-lingual context.)
Word likes precomposed Unicode characters. Decomposed characters will make the spell check go wild. macOS, on the other hand, loves decomposed characters, and will insert them in places where you don’t want them.
I've had a BBEdit license since ca. 2000. And I've always been happy to pay for license upgrades as new major versions are published, even though for programming I've primarily used Emacs since 2012.
It's still a wonderful tool for working with and transforming plain text.
It depends on what you want and like. I like BBEdit more than Code despite Code arguably being more capable for, er, code, because -- at least for the way my brain works, apparently -- BBEdit is better at editing. Most of what I do with it is technical writing in Markdown.
Having said that, though, BBEdit 14's LSP integration closes the gap in coding for me sufficiently, at least for PHP and Elixir. And there are sort of quirky features like the Unix Worksheet, "text factories," and BBEdit 14's new notebook feature that I'm using a lot.
For me, I like that a lot of the text manipulation stuff I use is built-in to BBEdit, compared to VSCode where a lot of that responsibility is pushed off to extensions where the quality or consistency can be variable.
One example is hard wrap (like for git commit messages). It seems crazy to me that that’s a third party thing and not built in to VSCode.
Yeah, I've used BBEdit for all 30 years and VSCode since it was pretty young.
BBEdit is my "i want all of my text files in separate windows" editor. I have it set that way on purpose. I do this mainly for my own spatial organization reason and the fact that I don't like the way BBEdit handles multiple files in one window. I've just started using the new Notes window, and it is a nice implementation that I've been using at work to keep track of dev projects, one note for each project. Very nice and no manual saving needed.
VSCode is still open all the time for IDE purposes. I need the refactoring capabilities and I would find it really hard to live without GitLens, to be honest. I also really, really like file tabs across the top for development! I'm not really sure why BBEdit never implemented this.
To the question, VSCode is missing a bunch of the cool "text-edity" features that I love about BBEdit. All of the stuff in the "Text..." menu, that is. I'm sure you can get all these things with various VSCode plugins, but I don't want to have to go find all of these things. I just want them there. So for now, it's both open pretty much all day!
I went from BBEdit Lite back in the MacOS 8 days (used SaintEdit in System 7 after I got it off a BMUG CD-ROM) to TextWrangler and eventually in like 2014 finally paid for BBEdit.
I'm not a programmer, but I switched to hand-coding my personal website a few years ago and started using BBEdit more and more. The text filters, multifile search-and-replace, and clearly written manual have been especially helpful. The program is a pleasure to use.
BBEdit is the first programmer's editor I used. It was 1998 and I got a job at a Portland design agency who ran Linux on servers and macOS 9 on desktop. BBEdit's powerful search and replace function was also my first encounter with regular expressions. Later I switched my desktop to Linux and my editor to Emacs, but I kept returning to BBEdit for its search and replace, while I was still ramping up on Linux.
BBEdit stokes super fond memories for me and I wish the best of luck to the project into the future.
Same here (college, late 90's), but forgot it was still around until recently (sorry). A couple of years ago I was getting annoyed with the common editor used by my co-workers and searched and found BBEdit was still maintained. Got it back and still has the nice search features.
BBEdit is such a wonderful app. I'll be honest, I have never used it as my primary editor -- I grew up on TextMate and the like -- but if I want something reliable and performant, nothing is better.
I pay for a license every version just because I want to support teams building apps that have been around for as long as BBEdit has been around and that are so thoughtfully designed and lovingly supported.
When you talk to BBEdit diehards, they talk about it the same way people speak of their very favorite and most-treasured tools, and even in the realm of text editors (where, let's face it, we're just downright passionate about our editor), that is rare and wonderful to see.
Yeah, it’s large file performance is unparalleled. As well as the way it does search and replace. As I said, it’s not my primary editor, but if I need to handle a large file, it’s where I start and end.
I have a lot of love for BBEdit. That and textwrangler have been on every mac I’ve owned ++. Usually works like a charm and I get a new license with a new mac. I still use it for large files and when I know I need to experiment with regex on someone else’s output.
++ there was that time I had to remove bbedit just to force myself to get used to vscode.
* tapping on a folder icon and then a bunch of rumbling in the cage from hard drives back then.
* the excitement with controlling a virtual world using a graphical user interface.
* Doing the floppy shuffle on a system without a hard drive.
We were still at the stage of "all computers are miraculous" and along came the mac with graphics/UI consistency and quality which just seemed impossible.
I still find computing amazing, but those early days of wonder and awe were great.
I think i even paid for it back in the 90s, when it was legitimate shareware. I don't think i "cracked" it with resedit like so many other things on mac OS 7/8/9.
If you stack up all of my software (not game) purchases, and label them "for Apples" and "for Windows" i think macos wins. And that predates OS X desktop, even. Something about the apple ecosystem made me want to spend money to support it. So i take full credit for apple being [one of] the first trillion dollar companies on earth.
BBEdit still has the best multi-file search-and-replace feature of any editor I've ever used. Tons of options, a visual pattern builder, multiple simultaneous search source directories and the option to save search sets, it's saved me innumerable hours of tedium.
The multi file search and replace is so good that it kept me coding Python in BBEdit long after I should have switched to something better suited to the task.
I've previously been able to edit large files with vim, emacs as far back as 1998 and other editors on OSX for a while, what would happen in editors such as hexfiend, glogg, pilotedit,vim,emacs etc ?
Unless bbedit available for another platform that wasn't osx ? (my history is shady).
I still keep updating it (been using it since 1.x days) for multi-file search as well, even as the rest of my workflow is tmux, nvim and other command-line tools. BBedit's diff tool is excellent too.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] thread[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBEdit
It didn't do much back then; the name was accurate. There was a lot of competition over the years but nothing else persevered.
It's still installed, though. I was mildly annoyed that I paid for a version 14 license and then about 6 months later version 15 came out and my license didn't work in it.
It's probably still worth the money, but I'm enjoying CotEditor for my basic text editing needs.
Edit: My version numbers may be confused. Whatever they are, my license only worked for less than a year. I did ask support if I qualified for the next version, and they said no.
The current version of BBEdit is 14.1. Maybe you're getting the version numbers confused here. (BBEdit 14 came out in mid-July of 2021, and while a version 13 license would indeed not work in it because new versions require new licenses, the web site clearly states you can upgrade from BBEdit 13 for free if you bought it on or after January 1, 2021. IIRC, Bare Bones has always been fairly generous in this kind of upgrade policy.)
> And I finally stopped last year when I switched to CotEditor, wanting something more macOS native.
BBEdit has always been a native Mac program, so I'm not sure what it is you're trying to get at here?
By "Versions" I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but BBEdit integrates with the Mac's native file versioning at a level that I don't think I've seen any other editor do. You can select "Search > Find Differences > Compare Against Previous Version" and get a diff just the way you would if you were comparing versions in Git or Subversion.
Congrats to the developer(s). It tells a lot about your consistency when you're able to maintain something for 30 years.
But not actually writing code anymore. I guess I must have started with BBEdit Lite in 1994. Would love to go back to 1994.
* Pattern Playground * space/tab/line ending conversions
If your text file is a disaster zone or needs some corrective measures, BBEdit.
If I bothered to spend time with it, I’m pretty sure I could make it do cool IDE-like things, but it’s too late for all that now.
It's still a wonderful tool for working with and transforming plain text.
Having said that, though, BBEdit 14's LSP integration closes the gap in coding for me sufficiently, at least for PHP and Elixir. And there are sort of quirky features like the Unix Worksheet, "text factories," and BBEdit 14's new notebook feature that I'm using a lot.
One example is hard wrap (like for git commit messages). It seems crazy to me that that’s a third party thing and not built in to VSCode.
BBEdit is my "i want all of my text files in separate windows" editor. I have it set that way on purpose. I do this mainly for my own spatial organization reason and the fact that I don't like the way BBEdit handles multiple files in one window. I've just started using the new Notes window, and it is a nice implementation that I've been using at work to keep track of dev projects, one note for each project. Very nice and no manual saving needed.
VSCode is still open all the time for IDE purposes. I need the refactoring capabilities and I would find it really hard to live without GitLens, to be honest. I also really, really like file tabs across the top for development! I'm not really sure why BBEdit never implemented this.
To the question, VSCode is missing a bunch of the cool "text-edity" features that I love about BBEdit. All of the stuff in the "Text..." menu, that is. I'm sure you can get all these things with various VSCode plugins, but I don't want to have to go find all of these things. I just want them there. So for now, it's both open pretty much all day!
Awesome app. One of my “must-have” apps.
I use Xcode for most of my day-to-day iOS/MacOS stuff, but BBEdit, for all my server work.
BBEdit stokes super fond memories for me and I wish the best of luck to the project into the future.
I pay for a license every version just because I want to support teams building apps that have been around for as long as BBEdit has been around and that are so thoughtfully designed and lovingly supported.
When you talk to BBEdit diehards, they talk about it the same way people speak of their very favorite and most-treasured tools, and even in the realm of text editors (where, let's face it, we're just downright passionate about our editor), that is rare and wonderful to see.
Here is to 30 more years!
Although I've used BBEdit off and on since like 1992, I find TextMate a better editor in almost every way. But it does suck on large text files.
++ there was that time I had to remove bbedit just to force myself to get used to vscode.
System 7, fun times.
I remember:
Still exciting.* Doing the floppy shuffle on a system without a hard drive.
We were still at the stage of "all computers are miraculous" and along came the mac with graphics/UI consistency and quality which just seemed impossible.
I still find computing amazing, but those early days of wonder and awe were great.
Still come back to it.
BBEdit just rocks.
If you stack up all of my software (not game) purchases, and label them "for Apples" and "for Windows" i think macos wins. And that predates OS X desktop, even. Something about the apple ecosystem made me want to spend money to support it. So i take full credit for apple being [one of] the first trillion dollar companies on earth.
It's worth the price for that one feature alone.
Unless bbedit available for another platform that wasn't osx ? (my history is shady).
These days I use it mostly for one-offs and as a scratch pad. It’s doing a very good job at that.