The iOS and Mac markets are almost the same size?

It sucked less.

Loved that tag line.

I've switched to CotEditor for lightweight text editing.

perhaps some weird nostalgia thing? I first saw it in... 1998? was at a web dev shop, and most of the Mac people there were all in love with bbedit. it seemed fairly odd and slow (as did most of the Mac stuff they ran), but it might have been one of the only decent text editors around at that time? I wasn't much of a Mac person then (as likely evidenced by my comments above).

I'm a fan of vim, BBEdit, and Visual Studio Code, but "less capable than emacs" describes just about every text editor.

While I'm using VSCode a lot more these days, I still like BBEdit a lot. It's a Mac-native programmer's text editor that manages to remain performant on large files.

I think part of the problem is that in order to make a good programmer's text editor, you need a large community of people who're able and willing to make good plugins for it, and any text editor with a userbase smaller than "half of all linux nerds" isn't going to have enough engineer hours put into all its per-language tooling. Visual Studio Code manages to attract enough developer attention to get people to work on compatible language servers and whatnot, but the granddaddy of all Mac text editors can't attract that much attention.

Plus, I get a _lot_ of mileage out of multiple cursors. Way more than I'd have expected ten years ago.

BBEdit probably isn't the best choice for code by modern standards, but it's super good at being a fast Swiss army knife for text.

This is a frustratingly hard assertion to defend, at least in very short form, but I've been a technical writer for years now, mostly working in Markdown, and I keep coming back to BBEdit. It's not one huge thing that it does better for me than other editors, it's a collection of little things: every editor has some kind of "open file by name via fuzzy searching" command, for instance, but BBEdit lets me open multiple matching files at once. (Yes, this turns out to be immensely useful for me.) It keeps a search and replace history and lets me save patterns with a meaningful name. Its "multi-file search" window isn't as fast as some other editors, but it's insanely targetable, and again, lets me save my criteria with names (i.e., "All but JSON"). The "Process Duplicate Lines" command lets me easily find "duplicates" defined with a match pattern in a 75,000-line JSON file (don't ask). I can build complex operations up and save them as a text factory. I occasionally do operations with its "Shell Worksheet" capability, sort of a weirdo hybrid between a built-in terminal and a persistent text file. (I also like that every project gets its own persistent shell worksheet and persistent "scratch file," which you can set to be any language type.)

I've tried a lot of other editors over the years, including VS Code, and either they don't have features that I use in my technical writing or they don't, at least to me, implement them as well. And as lame as some people undoubtedly think "it works like a Mac app" is as a feature, well, it's actually kind of refreshing to have a full-featured text editor that does that BBEdit works like a Mac app. It seems almost quaint to have an actual preference window come up in a text editor when you select "Preferences..." these days, but it turns out they're actually really good at, you know, setting preferences. (Modifying keyboard shortcuts is so much nicer in BBEdit than in any other editor I've used.)

Again, for coding, BBEdit has fallen behind the times; the structure is there for it to mostly keep up, but the ecosystem just isn't there and, barring a strange resurgence, probably never will be. Personally, I use MacVim for coding bigger projects now -- although I'll generally use BBEdit for short shell or dynamic scripts if it already happens to be open. But for managing huge honking websites with thousands of Markdown source files -- or even just dozens -- I just haven't found anything that beats BBEdit.

Personally I keep it around because it can handle opening a 250MB sql dump and searching it fairly quickly. And it’ll do easy multi file searches without all of the overhead an IDE brings, but still has syntax highlighting and character conversion stuff.

Maybe it’s for people like me that have never learned emacs.

For code, you’re probably right it isn’t all that great. But as text editor on the Mac it can do anything.

What Photoshop is to images, BBEdit is to text.

Plus the experience of Electron apps is generally superior lately. Look and feel may not be as consistent as the ideal but it generally never was in the first place, even among native Cocoa apps. The web has won on desktop.

Which frameworks? AppKit is mostly stable, even too stable.

One of the first things I learnt in English 101 is that "I think" is redundant.

Your writing something automatically implies that it's what you think.

Unless you explicitly say something is a "fact" or quote a 3rd party.

I’ve had my personal blog be linked on HN without my knowledge and the comments damn near made me stop writing altogether. Everyone assumed I wrote the post for them to read it, when in reality I just wrote it for myself and someone else submitted it.

Kinda. The original NetNewsWire was made by the same guy behind the current NetNewsWire. It's just that there was a period in between where NetNewsWire was owned and developed by someone else.

I think the term "news" is being stretched here..

Anything added after iOS 6 is the cheeky answer, but it’s not totally wrong either. Auto layout is incredibly hard to debug; it’s great when it works right, though, fwiw. The audio APIs are a garbage fire (equally on both platforms, at least!) Mapkit has a lot of sharp edges if you try to do anything more than Apple envisioned, which is true of a lot of iOS and macOS APIs. View controller transitions are a mess, but they may have fixed the bugs by now—I’ve stayed away since being traumatized by them five years back. The Metal shader compiler is an absolute shit show of bugs on the Mac, but is better on iOS. Core Bluetooth has caused me pain (just doesn’t work sometimes). Stringly types objective c-isms like KVO. In app purchases are a mess (I’m told, haven’t used it myself). CoreData might look like a good idea but you will live to regret it if it’s an important part of your app. UITableView is really powerful but also gets complex fast, with legacy baggage showing up when you try to get fancy (like auto layout and dynamic row height). The security API is hard to use correctly, also on both platforms.

Mostly though Xcode is the worst piece of software I’ve ever used, besides Wind River’s IDE and Windows ME.

That makes no sense. Wouldn't Apple want you to download as many apps / spend as much money on new shiny things as possible?

I think it's just incompetence.

you mentioned zero incentive.

no incentive to fix =/= incentive to not fix