On Mar 18, 2005, at 3:51 PM, David Lee wrote:
I'm curious about BBedit (having never really used it), becuase it was the One True Mac Editor. and becuase it costs so much.
Originally, BBEdit was a simple editor that could handle text files greater than 32 KB in size, with an unambitious plugin architecture. Simplicity aside, I suspect there are several reasons people scrawl 'BBEdit is god' in the pavement:
* It's better than Windows Notepad, TextEdit, etc for editing basic text, by virtue of providing a basic set of very useful manipulations (which you can find in TextMate's Text Utilties and Text > Convert menus) that some people need to perform rather frequently.
* The HTML tools -- originally in the form of a set of third-party plugins. I think it was just after the disappointment of the first generation of graphical web page generators began to sink in that the HTML tools became available. Good timing.
* Support for editing files over FTP (I believe this was originally coordinated with Anarchie, now Interarchy).
* BBEdit's developer never abandoned the application. It's been in more-or-less continuous development since it was first released. Several other text editors -- sometimes unquestionably more advanced than BBEdit at the time -- simply died when their authors decided to move on.
BBEdit has historically been very slow to accumulate new features, and they're almost always seen elsewhere first. The pace has actually quickened in recent years, as the user base has grown larger and more cross-platform.
That's my perspective, anyway; I don't know how well it matches with objective reality. :)
Chris