BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product
barebones.com
barebones.com
(Submitted title was "BBEdit is 30 years old")
Edit: some people didn't like "BBEdit is 31 years old" so I took another crack at changing it.
Edit edit: never mind.
Edit edit edit: never never mind.
The new title now seems inaccurate, or not reflecting the intention, given that, and given that the linked page says "30th Anniversary special pricing! Use the coupon code “BBEDIT30” at checkout to get BBEdit for US$30 for a limited time."
BBEdit was 30 years old last year because it really was around in 1992, but it wasn’t commercially available. It was basically Rich Siegel and his friends. 1993 is when it became commercially available at version 2.5.
Edit: that didn't work.
"On this day in 1993, Bare Bones Software (not yet "Inc.") released the first commercial version of BBEdit." https://mastodon.social/@bbedit/110350464886512663
This doesn't say when exactly Bare Bones Software was founded.
The anniversary celebrated was the commercial version of BBEdit released on May 11, 1993. Not the anniversary of the company. Not the anniversary of the the non-commercial version.
"BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product"
"30th anniversary of BBEdit as a commercial product"
"Bare Bones Software released the first commercial version of BBEdit 30 years ago"
Plenty of fine, accurate, straightforward titles to choose from, yet you keep doing weird, misleading stuff with it.
In fact, the original submitted title was fine, and clear enough.
It's apparently true that there was a free version of BBEdit released on April 12, 1992. But that is not what is being celebrated now. It's largely irrelevant. Rather, it's the non-free version released on May 11, 1993. That's why there's "30th Anniversary special pricing" of $30 with coupon code “BBEDIT30”.
30, not 31.
BBEdit, not Bare Bones Software (the exact anniversary of which is unknown).
Adobe basically told to piss off when I asked for a copy of the version of Photoshop I'd paid for. I downloaded a version of Pixelmator for free instead and haven't given Adobe a nickel since, and I won't ever buy anything from them again.
When it came time recently to start from scratch when I purchased a new (used) MacBook Pro, I finally just caved on the license.
One of those I told myself I'd 'purchase when I had the money eventually' and actually did, heh. Zero regrets.
But those guys have long since left the company and the "bean counters" took over the company and it has been downhill ever since. I too will never give them another dime. I don't mind their products, I just can't abide the management and company.
I've had the same experience as you did with BareBones though. They always came through for me with BBEdit. I told them one time they have a customer for life, and I've kept that promise.
…I say as someone who used Photoshop 1.0. (And HyperCard.)
Companies with solid products and solid support really stand out.
To this day I still open the BBEdit manual (to chapter 30, maybe?) if I want to figure out how to write some Regex.
I’ve never seen such clear and comprehensive instructions on Regex anywhere else.
I believe John Gruber wrote a significant portion of the manual back in the late 1990s
Here's one version: https://s3.amazonaws.com/BBSW-download/BBEdit_12.5.2_User_Ma...
See chapter 8, starting on page 171.
Referenced here: https://daringfireball.net/2019/01/on_getting_started_with_r...
Their mission statement is spot on: We don’t have investors to impress, so we don’t need a “mission statement.” We enjoy writing and shipping great products that address the needs of ourselves and our customers.
Also, it's funny: I am only marginally older than BBEdit. I can't imagine running a software project for so long, let alone so successfully.
Keep up the great work BareBones!
BBEdit (architecture x86_64): libz.1.dylib libbz2.1.0.dylib Accelerate AppKit CrashReporter ApplicationServices AudioToolbox Automator Carbon CoreAudio Quartz DiskArbitration Intents IOKit QuickLook Security SystemConfiguration UserNotifications WebKit CandiedYams Titlecase UpdateKit Foundation libobjc.A.dylib libc++.1.dylib libSystem.B.dylib CFNetwork CoreFoundation CoreGraphics CoreServices CoreText ImageIO QuartzCore
Looks like Objective-C, C++, AppKit, some other bits and pieces. QuartzCore has Core Animation in it which can either be used to create flashy animations or be used to create some very solid, high-performance text views (if that’s how you use it).
As a programmer who has used BBEdit for most of its history, and as the owner of a coffee house/bakery with various KitchenAid mixers.
The Pro Models come with excellent warranties, which I have used several times over the years.
And I have done many repairs myself, using my mechanical knowledge and diagrams from replacement parts sellers
But this site is fantastic. I have already learned much. And I have a machine on my work bench that I known needs repairs that will be much helped by Rich’s site.
If you believe in the right to repair, and you see in the market for a mixer. These KitchenAid models are for you.
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/97#issuecomment-5...
Text transformations can be done via regex, predefined functions, or any scripting language, where the scripts will be listed in the menu.
Regex search/replace has a history of used patterns, so you can reuse them.
All in all, it is a very lightweight editor with excellent text transformation features that no other editor can offer.
I use VS Code for coding, Emacs as a Lisp machine and its macro recorder for repetitive tasks, and BBEdit for all other text transformation tasks.
I'd be surprised if vim couldn't do it as a command. After doing a search, what did surprise me was Vim having it's own Fandom wiki. Maybe extreme Vim commanding will be the next popular livestreaming topic.
While I drifted away from BBEdit for coding a while ago, BBEdit 14’s LSP support has pulled me back to some degree. I put together a decent Elixir package for it and, to my own mild surprise, like it more than Panic Nova or Doom Emacs. (Nova has tremendous potential, but it feels like it’s still tripping over its own shoelaces a little too often.)
https://github.com/chipotle/Elixir.bbpackage
(This reminds me I have an update to push out, though…)
They will pry it from my cold, dead hands once I'm gone.
Long live BBEdit + Vim...
It's find differences is still unmatched IMO on any platform. "Compare folders" has been a real lifesaver for a ridiculously long time.
TextMate and BBEdit.
TextMate is no longer supported (if I remember correctly).
But BBEdit is still going strong.
To this day, BBEdit's diff utility is still my favorite.
Also, BBEdit always provided free, incredible and comprehensive user manual PDF.
Nova is a bicycle for my mind.
Nova is using, btw, 1/4 the RAM that IntelliJ was using. In addition to looking pretty. And feeling responsive. And not crashing my Zoom calls.
But maybe I just did not see a need for applications beyond the ones I could already get so saw no need to learn to write applications from scratch or was more interested in exploring. Too long ago to remember my motives.
But BBEdit is so good and has been such a key part of my livelihood for decades that I gladly pay to upgrade every time a new major version comes out, even if I don't need any of the new features.
That's the way to keep revenue coming without subscription extortion: make something genuinely useful that people truly like using.
However, I reluctantly have to say that when working with TypeScript codebases specifically, I do feel the lack of IDE features for recognizing imports and cross-referencing symbols across files. Any other BBEdit diehards in this position? What have you ended up doing?
Way back with version 4 (I think), I used it to work on a CSV that was way larger than the amount of RAM I had in the computer. Amazingly responsive. Not that long ago I used it on some XML monstrosities that were pushing a gig in size. Still worked.
I still use it as my main environment today. Over the years you accumulate a variety of little snippets and scripts (in all sorts of languages, including AppleScript) and whatnot that help with your particular workflow. It's very much like a prettier, pointy-clickier version of Emacs in this way.
I really miss BareBones Mailsmith, which was like BBEdit for mail. In today's world where everybody uses HTML email (boo!), it wouldn't be so great, but man alive it was good.
I also use when I'm trying to understand someone else's code. I like its multi-file search better than anything else I've tried. When you do a multi-file search in BBEdit (or a single file search if you use the "Find All" command) it opens up a search results window split horizontally into two panes.
The top pane shows all the matching lines, grouped by file. You can collapse the matches for any given file.
When you select a line in the results pane an editor opens in the bottom pane for the file containing that line, with the cursor on that line. You can make changes if you want there or in the regular editing window that the file is in or both.
You can have multiple multi-file search results windows open. I might be looking at a function in a file, do a multi-file search to find all mentions of that, and then while looking at a caller in another file see something that needs changing, and start doing that right in the bottom pane of the results. While doing that I might need to check something else out, do a second search for that, see something that needs fixing there, and do that from that results window's bottom pane.
How is TextMate doing these days? I know they spent forever for TextMate 2.0, and that somehow fizzled out...?
Seriously, if that could get fixed, I'd still use TM, it's my favorite editor. But I can't even look at the sources because they're GPL3.
Looks promising for you MacOS users.
Use it as my main editor still, absolutely love it. Still gets updated a few times a year. Just find it more snappier to work with than webtech based editors and the shortcuts and workflows are all more native on MacOS than VSCode. Also a big fan of the mixed font/size/styling when working with Markdown docs.
BBEdit is 30 years old today - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31008290 - April 2022 (104 comments)
BBEdit 14 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27905644 - July 2021 (159 comments)
BBEdit 13.0 Release Notes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21156348 - Oct 2019 (1 comment)
BBEdit is turning 25 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18602488 - Dec 2018 (14 comments)
Bare Bones Software Celebrates BBEdit's 25th Anniversary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17052289 - May 2018 (2 comments)
What's new in BBEdit 12 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15487561 - Oct 2017 (1 comment)
TextWrangler to Be Retired as Bare Bones Software Focuses Development on BBEdit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13779768 - March 2017 (3 comments)
Why would a front-end developer on OS X use any editor besides BBEdit? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9214963 - March 2015 (11 comments)
Back to BBEdit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8479905 - Oct 2014 (3 comments)
Macintosh Text Editor BBEdit Turns 20 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3833672 - April 2012 (32 comments)
Bare Bones releases BBEdit 10, cuts the price - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2781942 - July 2011 (3 comments)
I know the Worksheet concept wasn't invented by Bare Bones - I think they borrowed it from the original MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workshop), which used to be what the cool kids used to build Mac software before there were competing IDEs. But Bare Bones definitely perfected it.
(Is the BB order website incompatible with Firefox on macOS, or failing due to load?)
Update: turns out it's a known bug on their back end service (they're working on a fix). Everything now sorted out manually.
However I find it unusable without a way to enable Vim keybindings.
It’s great that BBEdit is still going strong 30 years later. But could the team throw us Vim users a bone?
Even Panic’s Nova has Vim bindings built in.
It’s a Macintosh application, it uses the Macintosh key bindings. If you’d rather use vi just use it.
Just because BBEdit existed during the Classic Macintosh days doesn’t mean we should be forced to use those keybindings forever.
I don’t see why providing the option for vi bindings is such a monumental ask? I’m not asking the default to be changed.
The risk in adding something like “`vi` keybindings” is that it’s never going to be enough for the people demanding it. They tend to always want more and deeper integration because oh, gee, this one particular bit of line noise is critical to my workflow! And this repeats until they’ve turned their target into `vi`.
If you want `vi` just use and extend `vi` and let the rest of us be. Personally, I only find it ergonomic when used with an HP 9000-300 HIL keyboard, which puts the escape key in an odd place, and with an ADM-3A because all of the design decisions the cargo-cult thinks are so ingenious are really just accommodations for that particular terminal’s inadequate keyboard. Hence why I use a Macintosh, and a Macintosh editor.
- Ability to auto-format using Prettier.
- AI Large Language Model auto-complete for code. The field is moving fast, but I'd love to be able to use open models here. I don't want to send all my code to GitHub co-pilot.
BBedit has an excellent built in text-filter functionality and I've written scripts to send selected text as a prompt to various LLMs, but built-in would be ideal!
Definitely a great utility, but recently a bought the new version and just a few weeks later a new version was released that required me to buy it again. That soured me a bit on the company.
I really like CotEditor though. Fully native Mac app, works great.
I don't know yet what to to with it, but I will probably explore writing language modes for it. I used to do this for Sublime Text, but I think Sublime lost its Mojo at the point of not adding native support for language servers.
TextWrangler. TextEdit is the editor built in to macOS.
I love BBEdit.