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but it can open files as big as your available RAM while staying fast

This is BBEdit's (and TextWrangler's) biggest asset to me. When other text editors on any platform on any machine choke on large files, BBEdit just doesn't care.

TextMate in windows is like this too.

For really big files, I like glogg (https://glogg.bonnefon.org). It's just a viewer not an editor but it handles files larger than the available RAM with ease (multi-GB log files).

Older versions of BBEdit and TextWrangler used to be able to open enormous files (larger than entire system RAM) while remaining incredibly performant. I don't know how they did it, but it was magical and a killer feature.

Unfortunately, that stopped being the case since they refactored the text display UI somewhere around version 9.

Are you sure it was that good with large files? I used to be a TextWrangler evangelist until I noticed it was mangling large files. You'd change one character but the saved file differed by far more than one character. Medium-sized nowadays, hundreds of MB TSV files. About 10 years ago.

Yup. About 15 years ago, doing search/replace on multi-hundred-MB log files and SQL database dumps.

About 3-4 years ago it stopped being nearly as performant with large files (even a couple MB).

I’ve never had a problem with either BBEdit or Textwrangler mangling files. I can believe there may have been such a bug at one point, but I must have sidestepped it - perhaps it was caught and fixed quickly.

I went from Sublime to Atom to VSCode to Vim. The modal editing scheme was alien at first, but now it’s starting to become second nature.

I might be transitioning to Emacs + Evil for a more IDE-like experience.

Been using first Text Wrangler for the last ~ten years. At some point as my main coding editor and later on as generic txt/md/csv editor. When they sunsetted Text Wrangler, ended up switching to BBEdit. Its trial version's free features are enough but recentely ended up buying the license just to show my support and appreciation. Awesome applications which can handle big files.

As a passing note: afaik Vim can edit files larger than (used) memory―thanks to the mechanism of 'swap files.' The same feature also allows it to restore the editing state after a power failure, even if the changes weren't saved to the original file (it possibly even restores the undo history, but I'm not sure about that).

I didn't think too much about this feature until I moved to Emacs looking for the sane scripting. Turns out, it's very nice to not need a hex editor to open a large file, and to have all editor features you're used to instead.

There's an Emacs extension for that (called vlf or vlfi).

Splendid, thanks! Should've thought of looking in plugins.

Though, from the description it sounds like it's still rather awkward compared to Vim's transparent handling. But I'll have to try it and see.

Yeah, Emacs doesn't have plugins as such. It's a Lisp system, and programs, packages, and modes can modify or extend that system. From what I could tell about vlf, it runs pretty seamlessly, aside from a prompt when you open a large enough file.

I remember reading a xkcd where they say: there is an Emacs command for everything. -- Seems there is an Emacs extension for everything too :)

The secret is that lots of Emacs commands actually call Elisp code, not the internals of the editor―you can invoke help on a command and then navigate to the code of the function.

(I have to confess that this sometimes comes useful in adding customization to those commands.)

Thanks for the clarification. I have to learn those magics someday.

Emacs blew my Goddamned mind one day when I was using M-. to examine the Lisp implementations of various Emacs commands. One day I dug a little too far and tried to examine the source to what turned out to be an Emacs primitive -- but that didn't slow down M-., which happily jumped straight into the Emacs C source to show me the implementation of the primitive. (I had compiled this Emacs on my own, and apparently it remembered where it was compiled.)

AFAIK Smooth scrolling isn't available on BBEdit, and my eyes can't track the code as it scrolls. If you use Cocoa text views or basically anything from NEXTstep way back in 10.0 your view would be either automatically or trivially be upgraded to smooth scrolling over the years. BBEdit seems like a perfect example of what happens when you don't continuously adopt and rewrite to new/modern interfaces.

> It doesn't have a giant themes or plugin site, but it can open files as big as your available RAM while staying fast. I'll give up a nice TM theme for "always works and never crashes".

I don't know what the early versions were like (it was already version 2 when I started using it). But I've been using Sublime Text for the last 6 years and I don't think I've experienced a single crash with it either.

BBEdit has a nice and distinct feeling of a well-baked application. I love its legacy parts with its take on modernism.

I'm not a very old user, but after touring the usual suspects, I've returned to it and I'm very happy with it.

Apple script, then, makes me sad, because is some of those things that, when you build, you have a lot of hope on that and put a lot o effort for it to be nice and beautiful, and imagine how people will love and how successful it will be. The team developing it probably had dreams and believed they were doing something innovative or meaningful. Then the harsh reality is that all the effort and hope in beauty and niceness were useless because the thing you were building wasn't really necessary or useful to the world. The fact that it was a team in a big company makes it less sad, if it was an solo guy or "small family team" then its really sad. I like Automator and think the natural language style of its script is a brave idea, but I found it too complicated to put to use when I tried it years ago, when I was a completely level-zero non-technical, And I would propably find it too basic now that i can do some Ruby and C#. Just as a note, I didnt get, in the end, if its JS or Python you want for Automator, or both, in this last case, please add Ruby too :D

I hope this doesn't turn into a editor war but.... I used slickedit since 1993 Windows 3.1 for Networks and loved it, ... VSCode is the first time I've seriously considered switching because AFAIK it's the only editor that has eslint integration and that's proved invaluable. It's not just eslint linting JavaScript but the fact that their are library specific plugins for things like React, Vue, GraphQL, etc..

I have no idea how well it does for other languages. I assume it does well for C# and typescript.

It does feel (to me with my limited experience) that eslint's plugin architecture and uber configurable rule system are adding something I had not seen in other languages. Hoping that other languages will come up with something similar and maybe more editors will take up the integration.

I came from another platform and tried BBEdit, but never quite got the hang of it. I ended up using TextMate and that's what I've stuck with ever since, largely for similar reasons. Text editors have advanced a lot over time, somewhat surprisingly, but ultimately I need a text editor to operate via the principle of least surprise and be incredibly stable. I still mostly use `vim`, but I am really happy about the state of editors on OS X. It's far better than on my prior platform.

> Everyone used TextMate, then everyone switched

Some of us still do, it's open source now, still getting updates and feels like a modern Mac app, all shortcuts work as expected, find/replace dialogue is a separate window, file panels look and act like Mac file panels complete with blur, smooth scrolling and elastic overshoot act as expected.

it used to cost eye-watering $200 until relatively recently. Big price drop made it an interesting alternative for Mac people over more "modern" alternatives. I've been using it for years (although I'm mostly a Vim person), but its old-school, html-first, nature shows through a bit too much for me.

I liked BBEdit when I played around with it, but my core suite needs to work everywhere, and preferably be open source so I can rely on/contribute to it limping along after the primary authors abandon it.

I use the heck out of BBEdit daily. Love it. Solid.