I started programming in 2012. Back then the “trendy” editor was Sublime Text, which I still use out of habit. While it’s cross-platform, it’s written in native code (i.e. not an Electron app) so it’s very fast and performant. Sublime Text, along with TextMate before it, popularized most of the UX/UI features of current editors such as Atom or VS Code.
Something I’ve noticed since getting into Apple podcasts is that many love BBEdit and have used it for decades. That said, I don’t hear much from people who switched to BBEdit from more recent text editors or started using it recently.
I’m interested if anyone fits this description and if so, why?
I’m not a heavy BBEdit user, but just started using it for Markdown within the last year. I’m relatively new to the Mac ecosystem, having gotten my first Mac about 9 years ago (but diving in hard core and completely shortly after that). For me, I’ve always liked apps that felt “Mac-like,” if that makes sense, and BBEdit checks that box. I also love Markdown and plain text, and BBEdit is very comfortable for that. Finally, I love to tweak things, and BBEdit is good for that, too. A while back I wrote about how I use it with MarsEdit.
I used kate via nomachine or x2go for years but have switched to BBEdit and Coda2. They both have pretty good sftp support, so I can work on my remote projects (mostly python coding) easily.
I switched in the last couple of years. Before I switched I was mainly just doing vim work on the server level or at the command-line level on the Mac.
Reasons for switching? The GUI made a number of things easier, it seemed like there was a bit less friction, more automation potential (not using any, but just aware that there is potential), the ability to edit files over FTP natively, reasonable price, stable developer (as you mentioned, very deep roots), etc.
The biggest reason for switching though is that I figure if I spend my time learning how to use it it’s not likely to change/disappear on a whim in the future. I don’t want to spend a ton of time learning how to use my editor when I’m trying to program.
Sublime Text would’ve probably also been fine, as well as half a dozen other editors - but I picked BBEdit.
Evan, why do you use BBEdit to send the post to MarsEdit instead of just writing in MarsEdit? I use MarsEdit and love it, but have never used BBEdit, so I’m wondering if there’s something here that might help me.
I tried learning some things with coding over the summer and prefer Sublime Text for most things. BBEdit’s text search tools are stupidly powerful though, enough to warrant the price of the app alone for me. I had no idea which CSS file in Airmail’s app bundle I needed to change to fix a behavior, but BBEdit did!
It’s mostly because of the Markdown support in BBEdit, David. Since I wrote that post, I have discovered I can set BBEdit as my default external editor in the MarsEdit settings. That lets me start a post in MarsEdit, but then open it from there into BBEdit. When I save in BBEdit, the post in MarsEdit is automatically updated.
Thank you. Now that you mention it, I just noticed that option in MarsEdit. I’ve never really gotten into Markdown — but it makes sense to use it that way. I’m tempted to get BBEdit now for the regular expressions engine I’ve heard about, because it seem like that could help with some automation.
I switched from Sublime Text. It’s nice. ST is super fast. The main reason was that BBEDIT has everything built in whereas ST you need to import packages (e.g. prettifying text).
Also the ability to open and switch between multiple files is nice.
OK, this thread was started 5 years ago but I must have missed it. I I did notice that the OP still checks in.
I fit that description.
I used Epsilon from the late 1980s. It’s an offshoot of EMACS designed for personal computers. I continued to use it until 32-bit support was dropped in macOS. This forced me to switch to BBEdit. After an eternity, 64-bit Epsilon was released, but by that time I had gotten used to BBEdit. IMHO Epsilon has a better set of features for programming, however it uses XQuartz for its windows manager and has some ugly keybindings. It also is crossplatform which used to be an important consideration for me as I ran Windows and Linux for work and macOS at home. I still have it installed.
All that said, I use BBEdit for searching code, not for writing it. It’s the only code editor I’ve got that doesn’t do formatting to tidy up, a feature I consider a necessity.
While I was a programmer I never found any compelling reason to switch from Textmate to anything else for quick, simple coding sessions. For heavy lifting, it was Emacs (or, more recently, VS Code).
While I respect BBEdit, I did not find enough value for money in the licensing price given the plethora of alternatives.
I used BBEdit on System 7 for a while but when eventually I progressed to OS X there were more familar tools for me to utilise (vim and emacs in particular) so never bothered to upgrade BBEdit on my newer machines. These days I don’t do a lot of coding anyway but vim works perfectly well for what I do do. As to Markdown not really a fan even though I make some use of Obsidian. For text generation I much prefer Scrivener.
I started with BBEdit long long ago. Loved it. But did not love paying for the frequent updates. So when I found myself needing to edit text on both a Mac and a PC I switched to Sublime.
Sometime later the PC requirement was gone and my use cases were different. I’m mostly editing MD files for use with DEVONthink, and the way I do it there are a lot of macros and other automation involved. (e.g. driving active Typinator expansion sets based upon the language of the current BBEdit document. )
So I’m back to BBEdit. Love it a lot, and the updates don’t seem so onerous any more.
To answer @sotojuan’s original question, given that BBEdit is still going strong 32 years on, there must be some group of users that find value in it (as with Epsilon as well). And not just us old folks, although as @Glimfeather and others have noted, once you get comfortable with a tool you tend to stick with it.
And as to @bocciaman’s question that revived this thread, I agree with @rms the manual is extensive and the forum would be the place to get the best answers.
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