Macintosh Text Editor BBEdit Turns 20 | Hacker News Reader

Macintosh Text Editor BBEdit Turns 20

macworld.com

38 pointspooriaazimi32 comments

Something I admire about BBEdit, and all of Bare Bones' software, is the detailed release notes that accompany each new version. Not everyone wants to read through pages of additions and fixes, but those that do know exactly what has changed and what to expect upon updating. It's an example I would love to see more software companies follow.

BBEdit may not be the new cool kid in town (which changes every few years anyway), but it's a solid editor and it keeps pace with change very well. I've been using it since 1999 on an old power mac, and it's still my main editor of choice. Congrats fellas!

BBEdit has been my goto editor since 1995. I own copies of many other Mac based text editors (Alpha, TexEdit, TextMate, vi, etc), but to my tastes BBEdit has always been the most feature rich, powerful and clean editing environment. And of course, I have a huge muscle memory investment in how to use BBEdit.

Other editors that I use regularly have some additional strengths in a given domain, such as CSSEdit or MultiMarkdown Composer, yet nearly everything I do starts in, passes through or ends in BBEdit.

I wrote my first website with BBEdit. It was a Dragon Ball Z website. Both I and BBEdit have matured a lot since then!

I have been using BBEdit forever. I try out new editors when they come across my radar, I have not had one strike me as any better.

It is possible that I'm just more used to BBEdit. Would anyone like to make the case for TextMate or Sublime or whatever over BBEdit? How are they any better?

Sure.

Mostly extensibility. I know BBEdit has made some strides here but there's no community behind it. I'm basically stuck with whatever Bare Bones ships in the current version. TextMate and Sublime on the other hand have a giant buffet of functionality provided by users. Want code completion for Go or CoffeeScript? Done. Want to add plugins to handle Git from the editor? Done.

That's not to say BBEdit is bad, just that I never use it for writing text. I used to use it quite a bit when the editor of choice was TextMate simply because the find and replace was so slow and horrible, but now that I've switched to Sublime, it's not even on my dock.

There's something about it though.. I'd like to use it more as I find the aesthetics clean and appealing. There's something about loading up a new app and having a CVS menu (and yeah, I know you can disable it with one click) show up by default that makes it feel a little old. Until it gets more extensions and a command line tool from the editor, I dunno. It's probably staying in the closet.

Good stuff!

I consider code completion, "that thing that makes me stabby until I figure out how to turn it off," but that may just be my failing. I do use various third party clippings/scripts with BBEdit, and I'm pretty happy with it's extensibility.

What "command line tool" is it missing for you?

I hear you about the CVS menu though. :)

I agree that for the past 8 years or so the community aspect of BBEdit has been in a coma. The email lists use to be very active years ago.

However, in the last year that has begun to change. TidBITS recently released "Take Control of BBEdit". There is increased activity on GitHub. And number of new blogs are talking about BBEdit.

http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/bbedit

https://github.com/search?utf8=✓&q=bbedit&type=Every...

http://www.macdrifter.com/?s=bbedit&x=0&y=0

http://bbedit-hints.tumblr.com/

So.. I think BBEdit is very extensible. The trouble is that there isn't a community building and publishing good extensions. One thing I do like is features like "codeless syntax modules". I've built syntax coloring for various obscure languages in about 15 minutes using this feature. (of course had I been using emacs I would have been able to get the feature in a few minutes with a web search and download).

I love BBEdit, primarily because there is an actual user interface (and good documentation) for most of the features I use. I know that, in principle, anything is possible with emacs but in practice I always have trouble finding functionality.

I do have two constant annoyances with BBEdit, though. One is the syntax highlighting isn't as good out of the box as the competition. The other is that the tab key doesn't automagically indent my code like in emacs. I've given up hope on these features ever coming to BBEdit. After 20 years, if they're not there chances are good they never will be.

There is an option to have the tab key indent code. I can't recall which version of BBEdit this feature was added in, but it can be enabled in the Keyboard preferences ("Allow Tab key to indent text blocks").

Sorry, this is not at all what I want. When I'm editing code in a language with curly braces, there is exactly one correct place for a line of code to be indented. In emacs, pressing tab puts my line of code in the right place. In BBEdit, it just inserts a tab.

I see what you're saying. That would indeed be a useful feature; I don't believe I've used an editor with such functionality (unless there's a shortcut in vim that does it?).

TextMate junky here, but I sure appreciated BBEdit trials every do often way back when I relied on Macworld discs to try new software. It was my go to application for a kid learning HTML/CSS.

How is the TextMate 2 Alpha doing? Any news on development?

It's not too shabby. It's rough around the edges still, and development is fairly slow. It crashes every few hours, but thankfully it recovers really well -- when you re-open it, all your buffers, saved or not, are there.

I've got a fairly large investment in TextMate bundles right now (lots of custom stuff that makes life super easy for me), so I've been sticking around through the nasty alpha phase.

Overall? It's alpha quality. Just what it says on the tin. But it's not so bad that you can't use it for daily use.

Same here. I didn't have nightly builds checked so I'm only just now getting the latest version, but it's been working fairly well. The bugs aren't enough to prevent me from using it for most things but there are times where it's annoying (large selections were an issue here) and I'll do it in TM1. We'll see how build 9090 does right now...

Not too many updates on the blog, but the mailing list archive can be found here: http://lists.macromates.com/textmate/ Not strictly development updates, but Allan is responding to things there (subjects are marked with [TM2]). If there's a better development stream posted somewhere else I'd like to see as well, though the updates have been pretty steady.

I just can't get into BBEdit. I'm spoiled too much by the functionality that XCode provides as an integrated IDE. As far as I can tell, there's no easy out-of-the-box code completion for BBEdit like there is XCode, and it can't display OS X platform documentation (file format is not proprietary, so it should be able to).

If I wrote things other than source code on a regular basis, then it might be useful, but I don't.

I feel the same way about Xcode as you do about BBEdit. I've really tried to get into it but every time I just fall back to TextMate. Would you mind elaborating a bit on what you use Xcode for?

I strictly use XCode for C/Objective-C/C++ programming. I don't do any web programming.

So having instant access to the API references, the ability to drop into the debugger, set breakpoints in-editor, etc. are all must-have features for me.

Especially since I'm relatively new to Mac OS X Platform Development.

When I write Java code, I also use Eclipse.

Have been using TextWrangler and later BBEdit since I transitioned from Win -> Mac, but always curious as to the TextMate appeal. I have tried TM, but always go back to BBEdit (and Vim more and more).

Other than the extensive list of available bundles, what do TextMate users really like about this editor, especially in comparison to BBEdit?

i guess this is the right place to ask, now that we're talking about text editors in mac:

could anyone suggest me plain text editor in mac that fast, small, and simple, with syntax highlighting for common programming files (xml, html, json, etc) but not trying to be an IDE? (i have intellij for that, thank you)

something like mac default text editor, but doesnt automatically show rich text version of HTML, with syntax highlighting.

my use case is that i occasionally open config files or code that i just want to "quick edit" without waiting 3 seconds to load the editor.

Vim?

Definitely Sublime Text 2. It's $79, but you can try in indefinitely and it will show you just an unobtrusive message every (I think) 50th time you save (and you can press 'space' immediately and it will disappear).

And it's ridiculously fast (the reason I started using it in the first place, but it's so awesome I'm sure I won't be leaving it soon even if it gets slow). Opens a 120,000 line xml file like it's 2KB.

and you can `s file.xml` in the terminal to open with sublime.

Check its website: http://www.sublimetext.com/2

I use (and recommend) Vim, but if you are looking for something less 'alien' and with a shallower learning curve, I'd recommend Sublime Text. They do an amazing job of making a lot of stuff (specially file navigation) extremely easy.

I've been using BBEdit since I had a Mac LC II. Great program and I still use it to this day. Glad it's still around!

After two decades, it (still) doesn't suck.

BBEdit has one feature that I love, that nearly every other text editor in existence fails to get right -- open files are in vertical list, instead of tabs. I hate tabs. I regularly have 25+ files open at a time, basically every file in my project. I can also use swipe gestures on my Macbook to switch files. Tabs I always end up driving nuts.

However BBEdit is not a good code editor at all when compared to a proper IDE.

I'm sure I've misunderstood you, but don't Sublime Text and TextMate also offer this sidebar thing?

http://www.sublimetext.com/screenshots/cpo.png

http://manual.macromates.com/images/project_window_with_tabs...

It used to be control-s, but now the shortcut for hiding/displaying the sidebar is command-k,command-b (for the latest beta of Sublime Text 2 on OS X)

As your screenshots show, the project hierarchy is in the sidebar, but the open files are still displayed as horizontal tabs. BBEdit lists the open files under the project file list: http://www.barebones.com/images/bbedit/project-window-lg.png

Submime Text shows open files as both tabs AND a vertical list on the sidebar, above the project files.

You can see in his screenshot the single open file being shown above the project files.

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