Bare Bones Celebrates 10th Anniversary

An anonymous user writes, "Bare Bones, makers of BBEdit, 'celebrates 3650 days of saving your ass' (according to the new t-shirt) with the the BBEdit Anthology, a limited edition autographed CD with every final commercial release of BBEdit, plus the free versions as 'bonus tracks.' Liner notes are included." It's $250, comes with a BBEdit 7 license, and only 1,000 were produced. OK, the price is a little steep, but it's a collector's item. And the company is also offering a 10% discount on any product orders through June 30, so it is only $225! I still remember the first time I saw BBEdit, a Mac text editor, and I thought, "what, like a word processor?" Some things never change ...

BBEdit is great for writing HTML...

[gdarklighter]

...which is why I'll save the $250 for web hosting costs.

Waiting For Apple FTP

[ihatewinXP]

-Just waiting for Apple to get their Finder-FTP working with read/write!-

Jesus Christ I should make that my sig! How in hell can Apple have a built in FTP client that wont say.....upload files or play nice with just about anyhting? For the love of god Apple, dont include things that dont work and are only going to irritate me (cough iCal 1.0 cough). Its hard to tout a feature only to say "yeah its great, i have a built in FTP client, seamless with the finder! whats that? does it work? well no, but its there!"

I know this is mad offtopic but I banged my head against the finder ftp for too long to not add my 2 cents.

Re:BBedit going out with a bang?

[pudge]

I don't think you understand BBEdit. BBEdit was a great program before it had any built-in HTML functionality, and it still used by many people who never, or rarely, use it to write HTML. I'd be surprised if most people who used it, used it primary for HTML. I highly doubt it.

BBEdit is a fine program for people who want to code their HTML "by hand," but it is much better as a general developer's text editor, which is what it was before, and always will be.

Re:Question

[jcbphi]

The full version of BBEdit offers quite a lot over BBEdit Lite (which is not much more than a plain text editor). See BBEdit Feature List [barebones.com] for a real list of features, but suffice to say BBEdit has enough to be a real coding environment (so long as auto-completion is not your bread and butter).

As for BBEdit vs. vim, they really are two very different pieces of software. vim is quite a lot more powerful, and is infinitely more configurable. However, I find BBEdit offers a much easier environment to work in. Forgetting a command never involves looking through a help file or manpage, and for light jobs its simple enough for my mother to use.

Also, BBEdit has always been the best text editor with a "Mac experience" (standard UI, file handing, etc). Without a cleaned up interface, vim and emacs are second class citizens in much of the Mac world, despite being much more powerful text editors. This alone was enough to make it a worthwhile pruchase for me (though I only paid the academic price).

Re:BBedit going out with a bang?

[Arkham]

I do use BBEdit for HTML now and then, but 99% of the time I'm using it to write java, perl, python, or shell script. BBEdit is a multipurpose editor, and different people use it for different things.

The "edit over ftp" feature is what keeps me using it. I know Windows tools like Visual SlickEdit offer these features, but I am so productive with BBEdit that it's hard to consider anything else.

I have to disagree.

[BoomerSooner]

I only use textpad on linux and windows (linux via wine) and the only editor I like on mac is dreamweaver. Granted you have to close all the extranious bs they have open but if you set it up as a text editor with syntax highlighting it works well.

I code in jsp and asp primarily. I still prefer textpad to all other editors though. The cursor placement and block select modes I cannot live without (and it's only like $30).

Re:Pricey

[kuwan]

Especially if someone could replicate the... tabbed editing interface on the Mac why is this so hard?

It's not that it's hard to do, it's that it's not the Mac way to do it, it's the Windows way. I, for one, prefer this "Mac way" since I am usually editing more than one file at a time when I develop and I like to have two or three windows open side-by-side, rather than having to click on a tab to see another file. I like to be able to see more than one file at a time.

This is how it's always been on the Mac an it's how I prefer it. This way is also in line with a spatial user interface (one window for every document, not one window for many documents) which may be one reason why many people prefer it.

Re:Question

[Phroggy]

As for BBEdit vs. vim, they really are two very different pieces of software. vim is quite a lot more powerful, and is infinitely more configurable.

OK, follow-up question: in what ways is vim more powerful and more configurable than BBEdit? BBEdit has more features than I could ever think of, and is reasonably configurable (menus are very configurable, and you can make plugins and scripts for it). I don't use vim; what am I missing?

Re:I have to disagree.

[ins0m]

You can get a lot of the same in vim, if you're willing to learn the keystrokes. I know visual block mode has saved my bacon many a time when tearing through extended sections of LISP or C.