I like BBEdit and use it extensively for text manipulation, but I wouldn’t want to write a long piece in Markdown in it.
The reason may sound trivial, but it’s something that really annoys me every time I try to do so.
It’s that BBEdit enforces its own definition of what ‘backward word delete’ means as ‘trailing spaces are treated as separate deletes’. The standard definition every where else on a Mac for backwards word delete is ‘trailing spaces are part of the preceding words.’
So, in every other Mac app, if you have the words "One two three four ", it takes two opt-deletes
to delete “three and four”, but in BBEDit it takes four. This trips me up every time…
Bizarrely, if you do shift-opt-left, shift-opt-left
then delete
, it works as expected. There may be a valid reason for this discrepancy (perhaps people writing a lot of code like it?), but there doesn’t seem to be a way of correcting the behaviour. Emacs, for example, allows you have different word boundaries (which is the problem here) for different modes, but BBEdit doesn’t, AFAICT.
It’s only a minor thing, but it’s a constant niggle every time and it’s enough to put me off. (And yes, I could try to remember to do the highlight first then delete trick, but I never do, because I’ve been using opt-delete
for this purpose for twenty years…)
Actually, I’m also put off by the fact you can’t change the left margin (the text always looks so cramped against the edge) or centre text in a window, or split a window to side by side, but they’re minor cosmetic irritations in comparison.