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BBEdit 14
- ilovecaching 5y agoI use BBEdit and love the editor (esp. love the new LSP support), but have hated the name and the icon for a long time. I have all these beautiful macOS icons, and then there's BBedit with it's weird acronym name and encyclopedia looking icon. Maybe it's time for a rebranding for the next generation! But seriously, BBEdit IMO beats out VSCode for speed and stability by a mile if you're a macOS user. And you're supporting a much smaller company than Microsoft.
- jtbayly 5y agoThe icon is definitely updated in 14.
- spiderice 5y agoIt is, but it is still really ugly and feels very out of place on a Mac. edit: typo
- tablespoon 5y ago> It is, but it is stilly really ugly and feels very out of place on a Mac. How? I just download it, an the icon looks totally fine to me. Also, BBEdit is really old. Having it change its name to suit modern fashions is about as desirable as having Emacs do the same.
- spiderice 5y agoI agree, I'm not suggesting a name change at all. That would be bad. And obviously the idea of the icon being ugly is completely objective, but I just don't like it. Bad colors. Bad shapes. Idk. It looks old, probably because it is. But plenty of old companies have modernized their logos in a pleasant way.
- tablespoon 5y ago> I agree, I'm not suggesting a name change at all. I was kinda responding to an ancestor comment with that statement. > Bad colors. Bad shapes. Idk. It looks old, probably because it is. But plenty of old companies have modernized their logos in a pleasant way. Modernization is often a regression. Looking at the icons in my apps folder, there are way too many seemingly standard-size circles differentiated by a little color or a less-prominent icon, and most of the rest are a standard-size squares with similar characteristics. It's like if the alphabet was all O's, but with different colors and small diacritics. IMHO, "modern" UIs tend far too much towards indistinguishably in order to achieve a "unified" look, which looks good in a quick demo but is detrimental to daily use. However, the ultimate mistake is Apple's, for creating a text-free dock that makes the icons do too much work. And of course, Apple's mistakes must be copied by everyone else, because they're so good at marketing (I'm looking at you, Microsoft).
- bonaldi 5y agoyou can make it look like TextWrangler too if that helps
- plodman 5y agohttps://macosicons.com/ https://macosicons.com/ Unfortunately it doesn’t stick if there’s an update but it solves the problem temporarily.
- wlesieutre 5y agoReplacicon is $3 well spent if you want custom icons to stick between updates https://replacicon.app/ https://replacicon.app/
- eludwig 5y ago>>But seriously, BBEdit IMO beats out VSCode for speed and stability by a mile if you're a macOS user I've been using BBEdit since the first release and I would never trade it for VSCode. They are totally different beasts to me. VSCode has been ridiculously stable for me and, as far as I can recall, has never crashed or lost a single line of source code. VSCode's speed has never been an issue, as it is ALWAYS open all the time, lol. I restart to update it and that is that. On the other hand, BBEdit is always open as well, performing totally different tasks. These days, I use it mainly as a persistent note taker and text munger. I will definitely be looking to test the new "Notes Window" functionality! Both great tools, open 24x7 on my dev mac.
- tumultco 5y agoI made a revised icon that imho fits in better with the Big Sur's look and works at Dock sizes: https://twitter.com/jmfd/status/1417595485653635073 https://twitter.com/jmfd/status/1417595485653635073
- _venkatasg 5y agoLSP is game-changing. I had made a bunch of clippings to work with for TeX and Python, and this obviates the need for most of those :)
- cytzol 5y agoThanks to using BBEdit for a decade now, I get bitterly disappointed whenever I re-open an application and it doesn't restore the windows and state it had when it closed. I've tried switching to both Emacs and Vim, but no amount of configuration nor third-party plugins could get them to work like this effectively. BBEdit works exactly how I want it to work out of the box, and I commend it for that.
- oritron 5y agoI don't know about Vim, but Emacs will do this easily with `persp-mode`. To skip a bit of customization work, get doom-emacs and enable the `workspaces` module, which will save sessions for you by default.
- thosakwe 5y agoTim Pope has a plugin for that: https://github.com/tpope/vim-obsession https://github.com/tpope/vim-obsession
- bxparks 5y agoBe careful what you wish for. I use one application which does not check whether the computer goes from 2 external monitors to the built-in laptop monitor. When I reopen the app on the laptop without the external monitors, all of its windows are drawn completely off the screen. The only way I know how to fix this is to reattach the external monitors, move the windows to the built-in screen, then close the app again.
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- DJBunnies 5y agoHoly cow, this the same BBEdit I used as a teenager with System 7. Incredible. Makes me nostalgic for resource forks & resedit.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoYup. I've been using it for at least that long. I've tried "trendier" editors, from time to time, but always end up going back to BBEdit.
- mactunes 5y agoYes, same here! I got my first Mac with 7.5.3. It was a Performa 5200CD. Good times :)
- incanus77 5y agoBBEdit was preinstalled on campus Macs when I was an engineering undergrad... in the mid-late 90s. I have made an entire software career, 25 years, since then, and still Rich Siegel soldiers on. Amazing.
- haroldp 5y ago> We know that many of our customers create a lot of untitled documents for quick note-taking, and rely on BBEdit's legendary stability and robust crash recovery to protect their work. We've added a new "Notes" feature in BBEdit 14... Ooh, guilty as charged. I see an "Untitled text 931". It's a list of hostnames. "Untitled text 107" is a Beef & Broccoli recipe.
- indigodaddy 5y agoNotepad++ on Windows has been the standard bearer for this functionality for quite a long time.
- rajandatta 5y agoSecond this. Other products have it as well but Notepad++ has worked very reliably for me.
- unicornporn 5y agoThis is the main reason BBEdit has been with me for a decade. I have NEVER lost an unsaved document during that whole time. You quit BBEdit or restart or crash macOS but they're always there when you're back in. Insanely robust. Is there anything like it on Linux?
- vbezhenar 5y agoIMO every program must work like this. I hate so much those "do you want to save this file" when I close a program. Don't ask me, just save it somewhere and restore when I open the program next time. It's trivial to implement and much easier to use.
- giantrobot 5y ago> It's trivial to implement and much easier to use. ...unless you opened the document from a network share or removable media. Or serialization takes a long time. Or the storage device is slow. Or you don't have write permission in the file's original location and have to pull a potentially large file from somewhere to persist changes to some local position. Or the local storage device is full. A "always save" mechanism would be best on a system that supported copy-on-write, network-aware links, and automatic file versioning to make writes super cheap. On actual real world systems that currently exist these mechanisms don't really exist or aren't universal so "always save" is fraught with difficult to handle edge cases.
- rubyist5eva 5y agoI switched to Nova about 6 months ago - great editor and development seems supercharged compared to BBEdit.
- LukeBMM 5y agoI keep meaning to pick up Nova out of love for Panic, but every time I've tried a new editor[0] I end up switching back to BBEdit. 0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25135058#25162222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25135058#25162222
- masterof0 5y agoSame, the UI of Nova is too flashy for my taste, I love the simplicity of BBEdit, and the perceived performance difference. I have been using Sublime and BBEdit intermittently , I will give it another try now that they support LSP.
- chipotle_coyote 5y agoAs much as I love Panic and their software, BBEdit's LSP support is considerably more solid and its text editing engine is just a lot more powerful. There are still some advantages Nova has and it's certainly prettier, but after about a year of using Nova -- I started with the betas! -- it still feels nerfed compared to both BBEdit and Visual Studio Code (which I'd argue is its more natural competitor).
- macrael 5y agoLSP is a game changer simultaneously raising our expectations for a code editor and lowering the bar for editors to get there.
- ziml77 5y agoLSP was such an awesome idea. It's amazing to me that this wasn't a thing before Microsoft introduced it in VS Code. It's incredibly useful for every editor.
- munificent 5y ago> It's amazing to me that this wasn't a thing before Microsoft introduced it in VS Code. For what it's worth, the static analysis infrastructure we built for Dart was designed this way and, I think, existed slightly before LSP. We used it to provide a nice Dart IDE experience in the Dart Editor (a custom build of Eclipse), IntelliJ, Emacs, Vim, etc. without having to reimplement everything multiple times.
- sandyarmstrong 5y agoCool stuff. I think there were a few similar efforts going on. For example, LSP was based on the protocol developed for OmniSharp, which was an open source .NET-specific implementation started in like 2013 by a Vim fanatic.
- rjzzleep 5y agoInteresting! Is there a source for that? I remember OmniSharp. It was a blessing when I could start to use vim when I had to use .NET a few years ago. I had no idea that's what LSP grew out of.
- sandyarmstrong 5y agoA source for LSP growing out of OmniSharp? Interestingly I'm not finding much. This isn't a totally accurate history but it's close enough: https://blog.logrocket.com/how-to-use-the-language-server-protocol-to-extending-a-client-764da0e7863c/ https://blog.logrocket.com/how-to-use-the-language-server-pr... The original project was at https://github.com/nosami/Omnisharp https://github.com/nosami/Omnisharp (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6006954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6006954). But over time it was split into several repos. The history article above says that OmniSharp started out on Roslyn, but actually it originally used NRefactory. The old server is here: https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-server https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-server EDIT: Oh, just found https://github.com/microsoft/language-server-protocol/wiki/Protocol-History https://github.com/microsoft/language-server-protocol/wiki/P... . This cites OmniSharp and also the TypeScript language server.
- alberth 5y agoYou gotta love how on their website they have the "Made with BBEdit" icon in the footer. https://www.barebones.com/images/BuiltWithBBEdit.jpg https://www.barebones.com/images/BuiltWithBBEdit.jpg Brings back memories of when all websites did this and included Netscape/IE/etc icon banners.
- mattl 5y agoPowered by WebObjects is my favorite
- jfb 5y agoI really wish it supported keyboard rebinding. I really wish this. I would happily pay for it, over and over again, but the tab key behaviour when editing structured text is just ... wrong.
- chipotle_coyote 5y agoThere's a whole preference pane called "Menus & Shortcuts" which lets you set new keyboard bindings for virtually everything. I'm not sure what behavior you're looking for with the tab key in structured text, but if you're complaining that by default it will replace selected text with a tab character rather than indenting the whole thing, you could always go to the Keyboard preference pane and check the box by "Allow Tab key to indent text blocks"...
- jfb 5y agoI have never once — in a career as a professional programmer that is coming up on 30 years — needed to insert a literal tab character in a document I’m writing. Not once. I’ll check out the bindings control panel, but in the past (as of maybe v12) it has not been possible to always force the tab key to indent the current line.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago[shrug emoji] I have indeed needed to insert literal tab characters in documents, for a variety of reasons, from editing tab-separated value documents and other data files to programming where -- as shocking as it may seem -- we indented with tab characters rather than spaces. Also, of course, if "expand tabs" is on, the tab key inserts the appropriate number of spaces. At any rate, I don't know when BBEdit may have added that preference. It's always, AFAIK, had "shift right" and "shift left" commands bound to Cmd-] and Cmd-[ respectively, which follows a pretty long, albeit informal, tradition of Macs apps using those for changing the indentation of existing text. (I get that it may seem awfully pedantic to separate "change indentation of existing text" from "change indent of text as you're typing," but if you've been using computers for 30 years, it's surprising you've never seen that before. The first time I selected text and typed tab and the indent changed, it actually wasn't what I wanted and I was pretty confused as to what the hell was going on, although of course I've gotten used to it since.)
- talentedcoin 5y agoCan someone here explain to me the appeal of BBEdit? I’ve tried using it several times but it never clicked with me. (I’m an Emacs user.)
- dhruvbhatia 5y agoMy story is rather dated and admittedly only one data point, but when I was in my early teens (early 2000s), WYSIWYG editors like Frontpage and Dreamweaver were the tools I used to self-learn the basics of web dev. The issue though was that those editors were rather bloated and ran very poorly on the machine my mother had bought me, so it became increasingly favourable to seek something lighter weight and non-WYSIWYG as I learnt more about the languages of the web and grew more competent. stumbled upon BBEdit and used it to a) grow my knowledge of the languages and; b) be able to build things in a more productive manner without the computer grinding to a halt. I think perhaps learning to code through WYSIWYG and then migrating to text editors is a common pathway?
- edoceo 5y agoAnecdata: I didn't learn web stuff via WYSIWIG (but I did VB6 that way, a bit). My first web-app was built with ASP in notepad and smashing that refresh button. I still don't like the graphic, I'm coding it (like a caveman?)
- Lammy 5y agoThis was exactly my path to loving BBEdit since it let me be a productive PHP dev (insert joke here) on the 5+ year old PowerMac 7300 I was able to afford at the time with my own money as a young teenager. I remember the HTML capabilities they added around version 5/6 being a really huge deal for a lot of people: http://www.atpm.com/6.10/bbedit.shtml http://www.atpm.com/6.10/bbedit.shtml I don't use a Mac daily any more, but I still can't use anything except ProFont in my editors after growing up spending so many hours staring at bitmap Monaco 9 in BBEdit: https://tobiasjung.name/profont/ https://tobiasjung.name/profont/
- deltarholamda 5y agoI've been using BBEdit since v4.0. One thing that sticks out for me was, way back in System 7 days, I opened up a huge (for the time) CSV text file to do some search/replace. I don't remember the size, but it was larger than available RAM on the machine, so maybe 20MB. It opened, and I was able to work on it. Recently I had to open a 1GB text file in BBEdit to also do a search/replace. (Not something I could use the command line easily for, because I had to make executive decisions as to keep or replace what I found.) Worked flawlessly. The application is ridiculously solid. Like emacs, it's very customizable. I have several wonko scripts written in PHP that I can use to munge data, but you can also use Applescript, or Perl, or whatever. Code snippets are great. But the real appeal is, again, similar to emacs: once you get into the workflow and set your editor up the way you like, including keyboard shortcuts, layout, etc., you can become insanely productive. It becomes a personalized environment to such an extent that the thought of moving out is terrifying. (Years ago, Bare Bones had a mail client called Mailsmith. It BBEdit-ized your mail client. I loved it, but email moved on and they didn't keep it up. I still miss it.)
- mistrial9 5y agohow can one author say "I have spent more than a thousand productive hours using your product" ?
- meetups323 5y agoThat's just half a year of full time use in a standard day job. An editor could additionally be used outside of work for taking notes or working on side projects. I've probably used VS Code over 5000 hours in my life. (Halfway to becoming an expert!)
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y agoIt's been around since 1992, even a very casual user could have easily racked up more than a thousand hours. Me, I only have a few hundred hours, but they were some of the most formative hours of my career.
- jmull 5y agoI should probably switch back to BBEdit for my daily editor. It's the editor I reach for when I hit one of the cases that chokes my other editors. I guess it would already be my daily editor except for some gaps. LSP probably closes one main gap for me. Now that I'm looking I see some other gaps are also closed. (Though a remaining big gap is that I have to do a lot of work on Windows and some on Linux, and I'd rather not have two different daily editors.)
- ibic 5y agoSaw this editor names several times before, but never used it. Out of curiosity, how does it compare to Sublime Text?
- LukeBMM 5y agoWith the caveat that I've relatively little experience with ST, they're in the same ballpark and probably roughly equivalent. BBEdit is probably dated in some ways and mac-only, but _possibly_ even more stable and quicker than Sublime Text.
- artiszt 5y agocoding can be slightly more comfortabale with ST depending on its plugins, for instance Julia is a treat given that VS Code can't be silenced to ST-standards [code-sensing-wise : eg ZenMode under Win may only work full-screen; attempting to switch off all code-sensing won't work, always something 'popping-in' when moving abouts in the editor -- that's how M$ is : either overdoing it and not getting the most basic things right or getting part of it right w/out providing options users desperately ask for : they decide what's best pratise for users and that >feel< is exactly not the sort of feel both, ST and BBEdit transpire] besides, BBEdit can be incredibly fast when it comes to larger files, sorting and in particular regex-search [never ever employed any Mac w/out ST, BBEdit, FileBuddy and DiskWarrior; HexEdit and few other free utilities, and one could get work done quite efficiently]
- mrehler 5y agoI like the completions of Sublime text a lot better for most tasks. ST’s packages are also really powerful and BBEDit isn’t extensible in the same ways (though it is through AppleScript and a host of other things). After the 30-day “trial” is up, the features in its free version are more than worth keeping it installed for. I keep an active license for it in addition to Sublime Text because it’s my preferred tool for complicated RegEx things and multi-file search.
- adrusi 5y agoAfter the 30-day trial expires, BBEdit becomes what used to be a separate application from the same developers called TextWrangler. TextWrangler was my first code editor because my dad had it installed on the family iMac for its sophisticated grep capabilities.
- baggy_trough 5y agoWonder if it can be made to work as nicely as TextMate for ruby/rails work.
- racl101 5y agoGreat, solid, reliable editor. Great documentation. And don't sleep on the diff tool bbdiff. For text diffing it's pretty fucking good.
- scelerat 5y agoThis is prominent among many reasons why I’ve kept BBEdit installed on all my Macs since the mid-‘90s, even after most of my development workflow shifted to zsh-nvim-tmux
- Account123481-x 5y agoI can't believe this thing still has legs.
- kasperset 5y agoI miss multiple cursor on non-contiguous text with BBEdit. I feel like this feature should be standard. I was blown by that feature when I saw it first on Sublime text.
- gcanyon 5y agoThis is the feature that drives me to Sublime. It’s easily half of what I use it for.
- gord288 5y ago> I was blown by that feature Is the feature Premium? Or only available in free mode? Just wondering...
- kasperset 5y agoIt is available out of box. I was referring to "Quick Add Next". https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/multiple_selection_with_the_keyboard.html https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/multiple_selection_with_the...
- tharShe 5y agoVSCode has this for free. I was never blown by that feature though.
- TheTon 5y agoIt supports rectangular selection via option drag, including zero width rectangles, which seems to cover all of the multiple cursor use cases I need. I do realize some other editors implement more multiple cursor features, so I grant that some folks may miss those.
- tempodox 5y agoInstabuy. BBEdit is the one app that has been on every Mac I've ever owned, since the 1990s in fact. No other Mac app I know has existed that long. It has always been rock solid and reasonably priced. I happily buy upgrades when they come out every few years. Thank you, Bare Bones, for staying the course!
- winrid 5y agoCurious, that's a pretty valuable domain name nowadays, right?
- mistersquid 5y agoBBEdit has the best regular expression engine second only maybe to Perl. BBEdit is the bees knees!
- tehwebguy 5y agoIt also seems to open much larger files than other editors will handle without breaking a sweat. Not my daily driver but I keep it for those files.
- chipotle_coyote 5y agoFor those curious, I wrote a review the other day called "BBEdit 14, and why you should care": https://micro.coyotetracks.org/2021/07/19/bbedit-and-why.html https://micro.coyotetracks.org/2021/07/19/bbedit-and-why.htm... (And yes, I know many of you may have valid reasons not to care, but I was aiming mostly at Mac users who think "oh, I remember BBEdit" but haven't used it in a decade or more.)
- mego22 5y agoAh BBEdit, the first editor that stole my heart!
- nickm12 5y agoI'm surprised no one has mentioned the release notes yet. I've always thought that Bare Bones' release notes read like a love letter to their customers. I love the little bits of humor and personal touches in them too.