6 ms·

The Venn diagram of people who use BBedit and NetNewswire is roughly a circle.

oefrha 7y ago
Pretty sure BBEdit has wider appeal than NetNewsWire. For one thing BBEdit is the only decent text editor on Mac App Store (not that it’s a high bar to clear).
- wkearney99 7y ago
  It sucked less. Loved that tag line.
- yborg 7y ago
  I've switched to CotEditor for lightweight text editing.
  - dclusin 7y ago
    Thank you for this. I've been using SublimeText as a text editor but always felt weird since its targeted as a more powerful quasi-ide... This fits the bill nicely for what I want.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    The only thing that stops me from using CotEditor is the inability to open a directory rather than individual files.
jolux 7y ago
What am I missing about BBEdit? I’ve tried to get into it a few times and it just seems archaic and weird and less capable vs even my emacs setup, let alone something like Visual Studio Code these days.
- mgkimsal 7y ago
  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).
- adiabatty 7y ago
  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.
  - josteink 7y ago
    > Visual Studio Code manages to attract enough developer attention to get people to work on compatible language servers Not to nitpick an otherwise good argument, but the whole point behind LSP and language servers are that they are completely editor-agnostic. A language server which enables great functionality in VSCode should be able to provide the same for other editors too.
    - jolux 7y ago
      I know what you mean but VSCode tends to have the benchmark front-end implementation for any given language server in my experience. Not how it should be, of course.
  - jolux 7y ago
    >"less capable than emacs" describes just about every text editor. Fair, I think what I meant is that Visual Studio Code has more IDE features than my emacs does (I know it's possible to have more but things seem less stable when I start using LSPs and such), but BBEdit has even fewer than emacs.
- chipotle_coyote 7y 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.
  - kohtatsu 7y ago
    Going to check it out when I get the chance :) I think studying old UX paradigms is super useful.
- karlshea 7y ago
  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.
- leokennis 7y ago
  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.
  - AsyncAwait 7y ago
    As far as flexibility goes, I'd be very surprised if anything can touch Emacs.
  - jolux 7y ago
    >What Photoshop is to images, BBEdit is to text. Yeah I get all these platitudes and stuff but I have used it and it doesn't seem more flexible than emacs here.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      It's not. But it's more friendly to non emacs-programmers.
      - jolux 7y ago
        Fair.
withakay 7y ago
As, I expect, is the Venn diagram of those that use NetNewswire on macOS and those that use it on iOS.

Pretty sure BBEdit has wider appeal than NetNewsWire. For one thing BBEdit is the only decent text editor on Mac App Store (not that it’s a high bar to clear).

wkearney99 7y ago
It sucked less. Loved that tag line.
yborg 7y ago
I've switched to CotEditor for lightweight text editing.
- dclusin 7y ago
  Thank you for this. I've been using SublimeText as a text editor but always felt weird since its targeted as a more powerful quasi-ide... This fits the bill nicely for what I want.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  The only thing that stops me from using CotEditor is the inability to open a directory rather than individual files.

jolux 7y ago

What am I missing about BBEdit? I’ve tried to get into it a few times and it just seems archaic and weird and less capable vs even my emacs setup, let alone something like Visual Studio Code these days.

mgkimsal 7y ago
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).
adiabatty 7y ago
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.
- josteink 7y ago
  > Visual Studio Code manages to attract enough developer attention to get people to work on compatible language servers Not to nitpick an otherwise good argument, but the whole point behind LSP and language servers are that they are completely editor-agnostic. A language server which enables great functionality in VSCode should be able to provide the same for other editors too.
  - jolux 7y ago
    I know what you mean but VSCode tends to have the benchmark front-end implementation for any given language server in my experience. Not how it should be, of course.
- jolux 7y ago
  >"less capable than emacs" describes just about every text editor. Fair, I think what I meant is that Visual Studio Code has more IDE features than my emacs does (I know it's possible to have more but things seem less stable when I start using LSPs and such), but BBEdit has even fewer than emacs.
chipotle_coyote 7y 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.
- kohtatsu 7y ago
  Going to check it out when I get the chance :) I think studying old UX paradigms is super useful.
karlshea 7y ago
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.
leokennis 7y ago
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.
- AsyncAwait 7y ago
  As far as flexibility goes, I'd be very surprised if anything can touch Emacs.
- jolux 7y ago
  >What Photoshop is to images, BBEdit is to text. Yeah I get all these platitudes and stuff but I have used it and it doesn't seem more flexible than emacs here.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    It's not. But it's more friendly to non emacs-programmers.
    - jolux 7y ago
      Fair.

withakay 7y ago

As, I expect, is the Venn diagram of those that use NetNewswire on macOS and those that use it on iOS.