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I haven't used BBEdit in over a decade, so my sense of its capabilities are surely out of date. I can't compare features, but I can tell an interesting story.
by adrusi 5y ago
I haven't used BBEdit in over a decade, so my sense of its capabilities are surely out of date. I can't compare features, but I can tell an interesting story.
Sublime Text is arguably a spiritual descendant of BBEdit. Sublime Text (starting with version 2) was heavily inspired by TextMate. In fact it used TextMate file formats for colorschemes and snippets, making it relatively easy for TextMate users to migrate to ST2. That was a major reason for ST2's rise to mass popularity — TextMate was not receiving updates and was MacOS only, and in comes ST2 offering a very similar editing experience, but with cross-platform support and frequent updates.
TextMate, in turn, was heavily inspired by BBEdit. BBEdit at the time was, as its name suggests, fairly bare-bones. It had auto-indent and syntax highlighting and very sophisticated grep capabilities, but not much else in terms of programming support. For a long time, it was THE code editor for mac users who wanted a graphical interface but not an IDE. TextMate rose to popularity by mostly mimicking BBEdit, but offering additional programming features like snippets and shell-script based plugins and more sophisticated syntax highlighting (enabling e.g. correctly highlighting CSS and JS embedded in an HTML file).
With BBEdit 14 now apparently supporting LSP, it looks like it has incorporated a lot more programming support features. It might at this point be a more-or-less mac-native take on Sublime Text.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- setpatchaddress 5y ago> TextMate, in turn, was heavily inspired by BBEdit. This assertion is surprising. They're not all alike in any way that any two Mac-native text editors wouldn't be. Sublime is markedly different only because it dispenses with Mac-native UI conventions (which IHMO makes it unpleasant to use on macOS). > BBEdit at the time was, as its name suggests, fairly bare-bones. It had auto-indent and syntax highlighting and very sophisticated grep capabilities, but not much else in terms of programming support. For a long time, it was THE code editor for mac users who wanted a graphical interface but not an IDE. TextMate rose to popularity by mostly mimicking BBEdit, but offering additional programming features like snippets and shell-script based plugins and more sophisticated syntax highlighting (enabling e.g. correctly highlighting CSS and JS embedded in an HTML file). This seems not quite accurate. My recollection is that BBEdit was just another Mac plaintext editor app -- solid, but stodgy -- until the Web arrived, and someone built a suite of HTML editing commands for it. That's when it took off. It was the plaintext editor everyone used for HTML until TextMate came along.
- adrusi 5y agoMy experience with BBEdit was circa 2008, just as I was first learning to code. It's much older than that, yes. Idk, maybe TextMate wasn't terribly similar to BBEdit, but at the time the landscape of non-IDE graphical editors was fairly limited. I'm only aware of BBEdit and TextMate on Mac, Notepad++ on Windows, and Gedit and Kate on Linux (there were also the vaguely graphical ports of emacs and vim on all platforms, but I won't count those). So I see TextMate as, at the very least, being part of a genre of text editor defined by BBEdit.