Anyone use BBEdit for code or Markdown and is NOT an "old school" Mac user?

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 tried it out a couple years ago after hearing its praises sung on podcasts. It was fine. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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.

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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’ve tried it but as I’m not a coder many of its best features are lost on me, and I notice its worst: no typewriter mode.

As a writer, I prefer iA Writer, Ulysses, etc.

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. :slight_smile:

Sublime Text would’ve probably also been fine, as well as half a dozen other editors - but I picked BBEdit. :slight_smile:

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.

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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.

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