Bare Bones Software – BBEdit 15 is here | Hacker News Reader

Bare Bones Software – BBEdit 15 is here

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BBEdit is a phenomenal editor, and when I'm not using Vim, I'm using BBEdit. BBEdit has everything VSCode has, plus the benefit of supporting a small company that doesn't spy on you or want to own the developer experience. They just make an amazing native editor that's blazing fast at all times.

If you can afford it, buy a copy. BBedit is not just a great tool, it's a piece of history. It's like buying a classic car that's continued to be updated with all the modern niceties to make it both fun to drive and frustration free. I really can't recommend it enough.

I’d trust your accolades more if you didn’t muddy them with comments like “BBEdit has everything VSCode has”, especially as you go on to show that you have a real ideological axe to grind, and by the sound of things probably don’t spend much time using VS Code anyway. Is it just because both editors are Turing-complete? Are you really telling me that the absolute buckets of money Microsoft is spending to re-EEE the development ecosystem with VS Code has not yet resulted in ANYTHING potentially compelling to ANY user vs BBEdit? I wouldn’t believe you if you said no. Please don’t ruin a positive thing with rants.

I'm always glad to see new releases of things like this and Nova. I don't quite understand the market, I've tried to use these editors and can never make them stick compared to other more fully featured or extensible IDEs/editors, but I'm glad they exist.

I'm going upgrade just to support them. They have always been great at taking care of me over the years and, who knows? I might end up using some those new features.

I love BBEdit and use it for pretty much all basic text processing. It's fast, stable, and reliable.

My primary disappointment is that I feel like for programming languages its syntax highlighting is much more primitive than others. I've tried to open Go projects in it with the Go Language Server installed. Go to Declaration and other navigation works. But the syntax highlighting is more primitive than Goland, Emacs, and others. Which is a bit disappointing.

Still a major BBEdit user though. Just haven't moved to using it for more complicated development.

I've loved BBEdit for decades now.

Now I'm reading about BBEdit plus ChatGPT? Headsplode!

What are people’s go to Mac (GUI) editors these days?

BBEdit.

I’ve been through a few… TextMate, Sublime. Used various IDEs heavily at various points. Used VS Code. Used Emacs (+ accumulated a long .emacs). Used Vim.

BBEdit is the general go-to for me on the Mac. On Linux, it’s Emacs. In the terminal, it’s Vim.

Back in the 1990s, BBEdit completely outclassed IDEs and most other editors. I’d even have a project open in an IDE, but be editing the source code in BBEdit. BBEdit could send commands to the open IDE to compile or run your project. Other editors have mostly caught up to 1990s BBEdit, so it’s not such a big deal any more, but it’s still a solid editor.

BBEdit and Visual Studio Code.

Sublime as a general editor, VS Code for when I need more language support

Sublime, but I have high hopes for Zed

Sublime for the most part. Will occasionally fire up TextMate though just because its UI is kinda comfy for me, being the first editor of its kind that I used back in the heyday of Rails.

Nova (https://nova.app)

It's so close to being great.

I'm trying it again but I've already had two crashes in the first day of use.

It's 100% stable for me. I'm on an M3 Max, latest macOS.

CodeRunner is a miracle (you need the beta for Sonoma).

Textmate for me. I've tried BBEdit and SlickEdit too but I couldn't really get into either, shame because I really like the idea of supporting smaller, independent vendors. Funny thing, for years I wanted to have UltraEdit for Mac but when they finally delivered it I did not like it (much.)

I use GoLand, RustRover, and PyCharm for most things, and got work to pay for it.

But if I'm just opening a project to look quickly or browsing code or opening a single file, then I use zed (https://zed.dev/). It's super duper fast and quite minimal but with all the features I need. It's great.

CotEditor doesn’t get enough due. Completely Mac-native and open source.

https://coteditor.com/

https://github.com/coteditor/

Nova and Sublime.

BBEdit seems philosophically opposed to adding the option for vim key bindings.

I occasionally use VSCode for specific extensions or languages.

I’m a bit of a stickler for trying to stick to default apps and tools wherever possible, and Xcode is so close to being serviceable as a general text editor with its vim mode and “External Build System” (Makefile) support, but has a pretty limited list of languages it can do syntax highlighting for, and the smart indentation seems broken for unsupported languages.

BBEdit seems like a good second choice. Does it feel as native as it looks? Any rough edges that bother you?

It’s the smoothest, nativest programming editor I’ve tried on a Mac. It ruined VSCode for me. While VSC is a marvel in its own, it’s the least Mac app I regularly used. BBEdit feels like home in comparison.

BBEdit, if anything, feels more native than the rest of the OS. A lot of bundled apps are kind of converging towards a coherent mobile / desktop UI with “screens” that you navigate between, or just giving up and embedding a web view. BBEdit remains desktop-native.

It’s nothing at all like Vim out of the box. I haven’t tried using any Vim compatibility stuff with BBEdit.

I find Sublime to be a better editor. It’s also cross platform.

I was about to sit and gripe that the only shortcoming for me in BBedit compared to vscode is built in ssh combined with python venv… but once I started to type that I realized BBedit almost certainly had a solution there too, I just haven’t bothered to look! It’s great software.

I want something as nice as TextMate but maintained. Wonder if BBEdit would qualify.

Isn't that Sublime Text?

Sublime is certainly the closest, but there’s little bits of TextMate’s UI design that give it a certain mac-ness, if that makes sense. It’s a touch less utilitarian in a good way.

Some amount of that could probably be achieved with a Sublime Text theme designed for that like Soda[0] used to be back in the day, but I know of no modern equivalent (if anybody knows of one please mention it!).

[0]: https://buymeasoda.github.io/soda-theme/

I think they have a fully featured demo you can download. BBEdit is a great tool set to have.

Yeah you can download the full product, it works for a trial period and then transitions to a less full-featured free mode, which does not nag you at all.

It likely does, I moved to BBEdit after TextMate and it feels very, very similar.

I've been using CotEditor for a while and I really like it: https://coteditor.com

Mac native and open source.

i'm emacs, i'm really addicted to macro editing, before that i was teco which also has macro editing. I'm not aware that vim has macro editing but I learned a bit of vi a long time ago, so what do I know. (Hearing that vim has macro editing would give me enthusiasm to learn it.)

BBedit, ELI5, what am I missing?

I know it's been popular a long time but I don't know what it does/why people like it so much

re: vim I sometimes accidentally press q and see “recording @a” in the corner, which means I need to press q again to stop recording whatever garbled nonsense series of commands just got recorded. I think that would be called a macro but I could be mistaken.

i see you and i have at least similar experiences with vim :) stuff happens and my main problem is usually "how do I get out of this?"

I love Emacs and its macros. I’m also a big fan of multi-cursor editors. BBEdit instead has amazing grep-style find and replace. It’s different from the others, in a way I found I really like.

Also, instead of extending it with elisp or maybe JavaScript, I add stuff to BBEdit with shell scripts or other CLI commands that read stdin and write to stdout. If you’re used to composing pipelines in a shell, BBEdit’s text filters and the like feel like second nature.

I’m a recent convert. When version 14 came out with LSP support, it became viable to me. It feels every bit as good at handling Python, Rust, and TypeScript (the 3 languages I’ve written most recently) as Emacs, which is high praise from me.

> I know it's been popular a long time

That alone may explain part of it.

BBEdit was on the Macs I used in school back in the 1990s; the keybindings haven't changed since.

It carries forward as an institution in the Mac world, like vi or emacs, with many users using it primarily because it's what they already know.

Also, a limited version of it (what I first used!) was available for free for many years. Back when free GUI editors were rare, particularly on the Mac. Shareware-style distribution advantage there.

> We spent a lot of time writing those notes, so it would be great for someone to read them. Be that someone.

OK, I'll :)

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