BBEdit is 30 years old today | Hacker News Reader

BBEdit is 30 years old today

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375 pointssndean104 comments

If you scroll down to the very end of the About BBEdit credits, you'll find the "theme song" "Editors at War", written by my wife!

That is one damn cool Easter egg!

if you scroll down of the About BBEDit credits, you'll find your name (and yours, and yours too, everyone is there)

???

https://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/faqs.html#littlesni...

Is there some conspiracy theory here I’m missing?

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.

It's worth the price for that one feature alone.

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 used it to search and navigate 10GB+ text files for a major project. It was the only editor that could do it.

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.

BBEdit was one of the first serious tools I've bought for my Mac, and I'm a happy camper ever since.

Reminds me of what that "Read Me" icon might've looked like: https://winworldpc.com/product/mac-os-7/76

System 7, fun times.

I remember:

  * 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.

Still exciting.

Also:

* 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.

The era of more RAM than disk was a fun one.

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.

Here is to 30 more years!

Performance on large text files is the reason I keep BBEdit around.

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.

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 used it to edit 4GB text/sql files in the year 2000. Still something I use it for, because no other editor I'm aware of does it in a usable way.

Speaking of Textmate do you know if there's any way to support its development? The license shop has been unavailable the whole time I've used it.

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 one of those classic software products that will always be associated in my mind with the Macintosh. Been a Mac user for 31 years. A shame that other Mac shops from that era like Ambrosia or Casady & Greene didn't make it.

Ambrosia SW! I spent a lot of my high school days playing their games, hadn't thought about them for years. (Also was a big fan on Freeverse SW's games and will always have some of the insults from them in my head.)

Glad to hear it!

Andrew Welch / el presidente

Re: Ambrosia...

If you've got some Escape Velocity nostalgia hanging around, check out Endless Sky - https://endless-sky.github.io

when did ambrosia leave the scene? i remember emailing them maybe 5-10 years ago asking about all the EV keys i bought. I really enjoyed most of their games, but ev:nova was [at least] 3 games in one.

I remember BBedit, RESedit, and the one i miss the most, graphic converter. It had a folder sorting slideshow mode, and it was, non-hyperbole, the best feature of any image app ever. slideshow shows a picture. You could press Command+number, and the image would be moved from whatever folder the slideshow was in to whatever folder you set up for that number. So if you were a photographer, you would load your images from the camera, and have "keep", "maybe with edits", and "archive" folders set to 1, 2, and 3. It was so fast and so slick. IrFanView is an amazing piece of software, now a little long in the tooth as well, that does many amazing things with directories of images - but it still can't do sorting slideshows.

P.S. Endless sky is pretty cool. there's a few EV clones out there, a couple on steam. Of course Space Pirates and Zombies tried (and the second one even made a huge leap like ev:nova did!), but none of them have the software engineering charm that made EV what it was. Fully extensible, user editable, great sounds (although some of the new ones just wholesale rip off the EV sounds), 6 different ways to play through and get an actual ending, etc.

I always forget the names of the EV clones whenever someone hits the nostalgia button, so i'll just say "before halo, bungie made marathon which was so far ahead of its time that even unreal couldn't touch it until unreal: Tournament.

> when did ambrosia leave the scene?

Hard to point to an exact date; it was a gradual process. The web site finally went offline in mid-2019, but the company had been essentially dead for years before that -- they hadn't released any new software since 2013, or any updates since 2016. Most of their game library never even got ported to OS X, so one could argue that the process started as early as 2002...

> I remember BBedit, RESedit, and the one i miss the most, graphic converter.

GraphicConverter is still around! https://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/graphicconverter

The OS X version always felt kind of clunky to me in a way that the classic version didn't, though.

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.

Zap Gremlins is why I have the app installed. lol.

Also useful for zapping text from MS Word as I recall.

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.

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)

I just this morning installed the M1 native version and it's zappy.

BBEdit is the only application besides the Finder that is always running, on all of Mac systems. I've been a paying user since v2 or thereabouts.

BBEdit just rocks.

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.

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.

Any thoughts on using CotEditor vs Sublime as a Dev needing to open json,sql,log files etc?

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’m going to give it a try tomorrow

I tried it briefly but found it too basic. The lack of tabs was the main problem.

Cot Editor has loads of tabs. Also supports ligatures and OpenType features.

> 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?

Mostly that CotEditor supports Versions, and BBEdit doesn't. I don't need to remember to save.

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.

BBEdit has a pretty strong ethos of "giving the user what they need" over what they ask for or what they want. Additionally, they obviously put a lot of thought into the interface and how it works. A lot of editors have flash, and an option and plug-in for everything, but I can't find things, the flash distracts me, etc. It feels more GNOME-ish in giving the users fewer good and well-placed options and less KDEish in haphazardly throwing in the kitchen sink somewhere in the menus and preferences if you can ever find it--but I've created a false dichotomy, because BBEdit kind of throws in the kitchen sink without ever feeling like they're just jamming in icons, menu options, and preferences incoherently--best of both worlds. In BBEdit, in addition to the logical placement and thought, they have a well-maintained PDF manual which I've gone through pretty thoroughly a few times. I like to learn software like this, RTFM, then I know what it can do. I don't like to "easter egg hunt"--pick around menus, or pick around half-baked after-thought "documentation" on the editor's website. I don't invest serious time into programs that don't seriously invest in their documentation. For me, it just makes a huge difference in learning a program and knowing what it can do.

I also just don't want to curate a mini ecosystem of plugins or extensions to accomplish my work--with varying documentation standards, interoperability, design aesthetic and sensibilities, and so forth. I want want 1st party solutions coherently integrated, full documented and integrated, and BBEdit goes this route, by and large. This isn't a magic bullet, but a different set of trade-offs that I strongly prefer, as you can find just the extension that works just right for you in a thriving ecosystem, but for me, I prefer 1st party "maximize the utility under the curve" kind of thinking, the same way Debian or a Linux distribution makes packaging uniform. Yeah, it's not compiling qmail with my custom set of patches, but as a coherent system, it delivers a lot of value.

I use BBEdit as my primary editor for everything, but I tend more toward SREish stuff than heavy development. BBEdit is really in a league of its own in what you might think of as the editor equivalent of "soft skills" like coherent design, ease-of-use, documentation, first-party features not reliant on extensions as opposed to having to use plugins and third party code (with the associated drawbacks, but you really can't match the functionality of your perfectly crafted editor via 20 carefully chosen plugins if you're willing to make an editor your lifestyle) etc. Unfortunately, in practice, that does tend to lose to "hard checkbox features" and extensibility.

This is a really great summation of BBEdit's appeal -- and also a really great summation of why it won't work for many folks. BBEdit is fairly easy to script and customize, but it's not extensible in the "add entirely new UX" fashion that Vim, Emacs, and VS Code are.

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.

I’ve been using BBEdit more and more these days. Used a lot of TextMate, Sublime Text, VS Code, Emacs… but BBEdit seems to work everywhere and it starts up fast.

I’d also say that it’s one of the editors that suffers from the fewest misfires—in Emacs I’ll accidentally trigger some weird command by screwing up a sequence of shortcuts, or in TextMate I’ll accidentally expand some weird macro by holding the shift key down too long, and in various editors, I’ll fight against autocompletion that is sometimes too aggressive. BBEdit, for whatever reason, just gets out of the way and lets me write text.

I’ve been using it, almost its entire life.

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.

I still have a licence, still in my Dock, still use it for (a) Massive Files (b) Regex work.

But not actually writing code anymore. I guess I must have started with BBEdit Lite in 1994. Would love to go back to 1994.

nah, the music was terrible back then

So nothing has changed.

I have a stack of records that refutes this, from Portishead to Nobukaku Takemura to Elastica to Blur. Music was outstanding back in 1994.

Any idea how it compares to vim or Macvim for your uses?

Neovim still wins for outright text editing but here’s things that I just love about BBEdit:

* 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.

I’ve used BBEdit since, I think, 1997. Paid user since 2000, or so. Even since I retired from writing code regularly, every Cloudflare blog post’s first draft I’ve written started in BBEdit. Real or imagined, can’t stand the typing lag in any other editor I’ve tried to use. Great product!

You should write a blog post on BBEdit to help them get more users! Do you think the high quality of cloud flare may some way have been inspired by your use of BBEdit?

Seems like whatever editor someone might use, they /also/ use BBEdit. Like it rises above editor wars.

"Transcendent" might be my new favorite way to describe my old favorite application.

When they wanted me to move from TextWrangler to BBedit I was against it. Now I'm a BBEdit fan. Hopefully we see it in another 30 more years

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 a Linux user. For a second, I thought it was a BBCode editor.

Congrats to the developer(s). It tells a lot about your consistency when you're able to maintain something for 30 years.

no matter how many times i try to switch to vscode, i always come back to bbedit. no other editor i've tried feels as natural for coding – except maybe visual c++ back in the day.

Informative interview with Rich via Apple: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=r2xowjrr

This was my first development tool on a mac, which I was using much against my will at the time, finding comfort in Windows and SGI machines in my youth.

It was a life-saver as an application, the dev tools available on Macs those days were ... unreliable to say the least.

When I joined the Mac world in the late 90s, BBEdit was one of the first things I downloaded and installed. It wasn't until I started coding with it in about 2001, though, that I realized how limited it was vs. some of the other editors I was toying with at the time.

What made me delete it was an episode of data loss in 2005. I hadn't saved; the Mac crashed; I lost data because BBEdit amazingly had no autosave or document recovery features. I wrote in, expressing frustration. BareBones' response was "yeah, we might do that someday. Just save a lot."

I switched to TextMate, and then to Sublime, and eventually to Emacs (though I only rarely code anymore). I never owned a BBEdit license again. In that time -- ca. 2005 -- TextMate was picking up a LOT of BBEdit users for various reasons. Of course, now TM is dead and BBEdit is still here.

I did just check, though. Apparently, BBEdit now brags about its autosave/recovery features. I guess it turned out to be important to them after all.

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.

Any users/fans have any thoughts on BBEdit versus just using VS Code as your “everything” editor?

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!

vscode is always inserting itself between me and the code. bbedit strips away all of the crap and lets me write as i want to write.

I've found the typing latency to be significantly lower in BBEdit. Plus the UI gets out of your way easier.

Still doesn't suck.

For those who want to try out an older version of BBEdit, https://system7.app/ has BBEdit 2.1.3 installed.

BBEdit was my main html editor from 1994. Back when sites were mostly static files, its multi-file search and replace compatible with regex was how I’d apply site-wide updates, at times pretty extensive ones.

Over the years I have used many editors, I have a weak spot for Atom for code today, but I never stopped running BBEdit.

It comes super handy on a weekly basis and is still the only one that can open huge text files easily.

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.

Wish Yojimbo got the kind of love BBEdit gets

It doesn't suck.

Ah world.std.com, the first ever ISP.

Big fan of BBEdit, didn’t realize it’s just barely younger than me. I started using it probably about 20 years ago.

These days I use it mostly for one-offs and as a scratch pad. It’s doing a very good job at that.

I recall using this 30 years ago on System 7. Can I retire yet?

I do most of my programming in VS Code these days, but I still use BBEdit frequently for quick file editing and complex search/replace tasks.

Still my "go to" day-to-day text editor. My favorite editor when I used a Mac Quadra and my favorite editor today. Thanks Rich!

Same here, from Quadra to M1. :-)

Where’s my Daring Fireball post about this?

I just wish it supported smooth scrolling. Don’t know why, but I can’t stand the line-by-line scrolling.

I am a big fan of this editor. I tried others on my Mac, but never liked those.

I have my first copy of BBEdit from late 90's. Bundled on a shareware cd.

It’s also nice to see that a 30-year-old posting is still available.

Love its diff tool.

Still come back to it.

I thought that Google groups was down a few years after they acquired the archive...

Sez who? I see nothing on the BBEdit product page about an anniversary.

(those are the authors posting)

https://twitter.com/bbedit/status/1513874673913716736

But then this should be the link, rather than an unrelated page.

Original release announcement: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.mac.announce/c/gvPGyuX3...

Nice—we've changed to that from http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/index.html above. Thanks!

first release was April 12, 1992, but it was a proof of concept[1] and wasn't commercialized until May 1993, so perhaps that's why?

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

I think it was originally released as freeware. "Proof of concept" in the article was probably referring to an earlier, private incarnation.

It didn't do much back then; the name was accurate. There was a lot of competition over the years but nothing else persevered.

BBEdit was a very good replacement for MPW and Think C's front ends that pretty much everybody bought and used daily. Then CodeWarrior came along and it wasn't really that impressive anymore; still useful for the odd "gremlin" zap or gigantic, bloated folder grep that choked everything else you threw at it back when virtual memory was an aftermarket feature you had to buy from Connectix, but by and large it just sat there on your drive most of the year. It enjoyed a brief resurgence in popularity when Project Builder was forced upon everyone at Apple and folks grew tired of dealing with an impossibly bloated text editor that couldn't keep up with an average 13 year old's typing speed. A lot of teams with the clout to do so simply refused to touch any of the NeXT junk so they didn't have to bother with getting BBEdit to play nicely with PB--the Finder in particular remained a PowerPlant app built in CodeWarrior up through 10.4 I believe.

If your notion of web development is rooted in cgi-bin directories, server-side includes or maybe PHP 2 then BBEdit is more than adequate for your needs. It stopped being practical for anything "modern" anyone would ever want to do around 2005. You can argue that "modern" web development has gotten well out-of-hand and that you shouldn't really need all those ridiculous plugins to accomplish the basic task of putting a blob of HTML on a screen but that doesn't alter the reality of the transpiler quagmire we've let the Facebook kids drag us into one DockerCon at a time.

BBEdit's primary use case these days is giving John Gruber something to romanticize to hipsters who read books about LaserWriters. Blah blah blah Markdown blah blah blah my kids will die if they see a carton of milk on a billboard blah blah blah James Bond marketshare blah blah blah blah blah. The Simpsons shouldn't have lasted 30 years and neither should any piece of software.

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