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Bare Bones Software – BBEdit 15 is here

oblib 3y ago
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.
danpalmer 3y ago
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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
baggy_trough 3y ago
I want something as nice as TextMate but maintained. Wonder if BBEdit would qualify.
- eli 3y ago
  Isn't that Sublime Text?
  - jwells89 3y ago
    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/ https://buymeasoda.github.io/soda-theme/
- oblib 3y ago
  I think they have a fully featured demo you can download. BBEdit is a great tool set to have.
  - Nursie 3y ago
    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.
- mantra2 3y ago
  It likely does, I moved to BBEdit after TextMate and it feels very, very similar.
LeoPanthera 3y ago
I've been using CotEditor for a while and I really like it: https://coteditor.com https://coteditor.com Mac native and open source.
fsckboy 3y ago
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
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  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.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    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?"
- kstrauser 3y ago
  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.
- retrac 3y ago
  > 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.
softirq 3y ago
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.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  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.
  - softirq 3y ago
    [flagged]
saikatsg 3y ago
> 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 :)
tiffanyh 3y ago
What are people’s go to Mac (GUI) editors these days?
- klodolph 3y ago
  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.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  BBEdit and Visual Studio Code.
- petesergeant 3y ago
  Sublime as a general editor, VS Code for when I need more language support
  - drcongo 3y ago
    Sublime, but I have high hopes for Zed
- jwells89 3y ago
  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.
- etchalon 3y ago
  Nova (https://nova.app https://nova.app) It's so close to being great.
  - 3y ago
JKCalhoun 3y ago
I've loved BBEdit for decades now. Now I'm reading about BBEdit plus ChatGPT? Headsplode!
blueelephanttea 3y ago
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.
wwalexander 3y ago
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?
- kstrauser 3y ago
  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.
- klodolph 3y ago
  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.
whalesalad 3y ago
I find Sublime to be a better editor. It’s also cross platform.
monkellipse 3y ago
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'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.

danpalmer 3y ago

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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

baggy_trough 3y ago

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

eli 3y ago
Isn't that Sublime Text?
- jwells89 3y ago
  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/ https://buymeasoda.github.io/soda-theme/
oblib 3y ago
I think they have a fully featured demo you can download. BBEdit is a great tool set to have.
- Nursie 3y ago
  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.
mantra2 3y ago
It likely does, I moved to BBEdit after TextMate and it feels very, very similar.

LeoPanthera 3y ago

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

fsckboy 3y ago

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

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
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.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  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?"
kstrauser 3y ago
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.
retrac 3y ago
> 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.

softirq 3y ago

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.

cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
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.
- softirq 3y ago
  [flagged]

saikatsg 3y ago

> 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 :)

tiffanyh 3y ago

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

klodolph 3y ago
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.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
BBEdit and Visual Studio Code.
petesergeant 3y ago
Sublime as a general editor, VS Code for when I need more language support
- drcongo 3y ago
  Sublime, but I have high hopes for Zed
jwells89 3y ago
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.
etchalon 3y ago
Nova (https://nova.app https://nova.app) It's so close to being great.
- 3y ago

JKCalhoun 3y ago

I've loved BBEdit for decades now. Now I'm reading about BBEdit plus ChatGPT? Headsplode!

blueelephanttea 3y ago

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.

wwalexander 3y ago

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?

kstrauser 3y ago
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.
klodolph 3y ago
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.

whalesalad 3y ago

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

monkellipse 3y ago

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.