5 ms·

FTA: "We’ve always had the utmost respect for the user. Every internal decision about look and function answers the questions 'What does the customer need?' and

• alwillis 3y ago
  > Since then, I've purchased BBEdit licenses, but use other editors when I need to hard wrap text to window width. BBEdit is incredibly scriptable and extensible. You could have written a short script in AppleScript, Perl, Ruby, Python, etc. to perform this task without leaving BBEdit.
  • smohare 3y ago
    [dead]
  • miles 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • tantalor 3y ago
      Okay let's just take GPT's word for it.
    • edgyquant 3y ago
      I can’t believe this has to be said here of all places. GPT-4 is not a search engine of factual knowledge. You can not assume anything it says is true and not just a made up grouping of words that look nice together.
      • flembat 3y ago
        True, strange that everyone understands this about people, but hold computers to be an authority. Computers had this level of respect even when they spat answers onto a teletype and were called electronic brains whose thinking was represented by spinning tape reels flashing lights and an occasional beep.
    • neurobashing 3y ago
      According to Script Debugger, hardly the massive powerhouse that may end humanity like GPT-4, it's the "bounds" property of a window, specifically the 3rd element.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • veidr 3y ago
        In pixels, yes, but that's not trivial to convert to character width...
    • masswerk 3y ago
      BTW, BBEdit has a `hard wrap` scripting command with a limit option (page guide, window width, character width). And, no, GPT is not a tool for factual verification, it creates probable chains of words that are likely to be found impressive by humans.
      • smohare 3y ago
        [dead]
    • miles 3y ago
      Apologies all. Thank you for the information.
    • mistersquid 3y ago
      > only use BBEdit once or twice a month (usually for multi-file search and replace via regex). BBEdit’s regular expression support is jaw-dropping. Combined with how quickly it can update north of 10,000 files has kept me using BBedit for over 25 (!) years. And I'm looking forward the next quarter century.
    • phanimahesh 3y ago
      I'm somehat worried about the incidental harm caused by people relying on GPT's word chain hallucinations as facts for something critical. Most laypersons don't understand that GPT is not a factual search engine. I'm increasingly seeing people who should know better also forget this now and then.
      • bryanrasmussen 3y ago
        the problem is that the quality of data on the web is such you can't really trust what you get from google either, so you need to go back to the pre-google days of using specialized search engines, or accept that some of what you get back is likely polluted and you don't have the resources to verify everything.
        • beachy 3y ago
          Nail on the head. The web is a swamp of hot garbage, in large part thanks to Google SEO incentives. If Google hadn't poisoned the well, and if searching pulled up good content instead of ads designed to look like search results, and search results that link to web pages that take 5 screenfuls to convey one sentence of information, they wouldn't be looking down the barrel at an existential threat.
        • j16sdiz 3y ago
          with google, at least you could know where and who that piece of information is written.. with gpt, you got nothing but the same convincing tone.
          • chrisallenlane 3y ago
            You can ask it to provide links to primary sources as part of your prompt. This helps quite a bit with this problem.
            • jrmg 3y ago
              When I try this I seem to get back either non-existent URLs, or links to real documents that don't actually contain what it implies they contain.
    • sebzim4500 3y ago
      Turns out that the strategy of saying something false in order to get the right answer works even better when the false statement comes from an LLM. I guess I'll keep that in mind.
      • ptx 3y ago
        Please also keep in mind that if the corrections fail to materialize, posting false information will have polluted the knowledge pool for no benefit.
• akasakahakada 3y ago
  LOL kind of the same story as mind. 1. I want to change the highlight colour. It is too dim to recognize. People in the forum asked: hey I don't want hidden settings. Can you make the highlight colour adjustable? A: No. We won't do it. [1] [1] : https://groups.google.com/g/bbedit/c/yz_StJa9HVA https://groups.google.com/g/bbedit/c/yz_StJa9HVA 2. I forgot if it is the print function or what, it just don't have despite in the year of 2022. Oh wait maybe that is the function "export to pdf". People in the forum asked: Where can I do that thing? A: We don't know either. Go find other editor if you want it.
  • pr0zac 3y ago
    If it’s export to pdf I’d think simply being on Mac solves that assuming it has print functionality. Is the issue the print functionality in MacOS can’t handle files as big as BBEdit can making using that sometimes impossible? Or maybe it is actually a lack of print functionality and you’re remembering export to pdf cause it came up in that conversation? I would test myself but I don’t have the app installed right now.
    • kemayo 3y ago
      It does indeed have working print functionality. As you say, it's on macOS and so this automatically means it has PDF export. I'll admit I've never used said print functionality, so I can't rule out that it's missing something that some people consider important.
• justinator 3y ago
  I remember arguing for tabs, and he was like, "LOL I don't think so". So how'd that turn out?
• nickm12 3y ago
  Heh. I just looked up an exchange I had with Bare Bones support from 2001 (!) about the hard-wrap-as-you-type feature. This was an early BBE feature that was removed when they added soft wrapping. I tried to argue for this feature but was politely refused. The argument was: "It is not so much that the code can not co-exist as that the combination of user experiences causes confusion. The two states (hard wrap while typing) and soft wrapping have the same visual result and would tend to cause considerable confusion. Because of this we removed the first when we added the second." It's 22 years later and the feature has not been restored. I wonder how many times its been refused.
  • copperx 3y ago
    The reason I fell in love with Emacs decades ago was because how it could do both kinds of wrapping so easily.
• rvense 3y ago
  I wish my company would adopt this philosophy. We seem to just add features when people ask for them, and it really starts to show after a while.
• ferbivore 3y ago
  Was this intended to be a positive anecdote? It doesn’t sound like one - how is removing a feature users care about and refusing to add it back any evidence of “utmost respect for the user”?
  • wjnc 3y ago
    I read this as a positive. Practicing what you preach. Rich asked for a further introduction into the needs behind the users request. The user decided not to pursue that further. Perhaps the feature could have been re-introduced if the client had a very clear user story. We won't know. Is it fair to ask users for stories when you introduce UI/UX regressions. That's debatable. But Rick showed real interest consistent with expectations.
• Asooka 3y ago
  Hah. VIM has had both soft and hard wrapping since forever and they're visually distinguished by the line numbers and line continuation marks in the gutter. I find it extremely useful, as I don't want to write overlong lines for commits &c, but do want to soft-wrap existing long lines where they are found.
• veidr 3y ago
  > (Not 'How can we give them what they’re asking for?' because that isn’t the right question to answer.) We say some very similar variant of this where I currently work, and also at previous places. Personally, I've never been able to understand this in any other way than: a.) our users are idiots, we developers know much better then those poor souls b.) our users are idiots, adding a feature without taking away a marginally-similar feature would be so confusing for them, poor souls And I think it's why BBEdit gets this historical puff piece that reads like an in-flight magazine piece congratulating Madonna on still being able to dance at this late stage of her career. I used BBEdit 1.0, and probably every version after that -- including the OpenDoc component[1] version!! -- but I finally stopped paying for it after version 13, after realizing I only ever used it for dealing with my Japanese bank's legacy-encoding CSV files. (Which I still do, to be fair, but the free version works for this.) I don't think BBEdit has maintained legitimate relevance, in terms of writing most kinds of code, or even more complex text-processing workflows (for which it is better-suited relative to coding), and IMHO that's basically because of this attitude of "our users are dumb! we must protect them, poor little lambs!" For instance, despite having had rectangular selection quite early, when it was rare (20 years ago? memories get hazy...), I don't think they ever made the jump to Sublime-style multiple cursors and discontiguous selections/insertion-points (later made 9 quintillion times more popular by VS Code) -- arguably the most significant advance in text editors since the introduction of multiple windows. Likewise language servers and basically everything since 2013 or so. I might be wrong, though; I look at text editors from the writer-of-software perspective, mainly. TFA references people using BBEdit to write English, and as that endeavor has gotten more complicated ("just write it in Markdown" somebody once said to my father, and he threw a spiny squash at their head) maybe BBEdit's niche has shifted. I don't think it is relevant today as a source code editor, but maybe as a blog post editor, or applied statistics prompt editor, etc? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc