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Utilities (Apple) Businesses Software Apple

Bare Bones Releases TextWrangler 114

Posted by pudge from the editing-is-as-editing-does dept.
Bare Bones has released TextWrangler, a new editor that fills the need for users who want the power of BBEdit, but don't do software development. It is available for Mac OS v9.1 and Mac OS X v10.1.5 and up, and retails for $49, while BBEdit sells for $179. It has the core text-editing functionality of BBEdit, but not the software development features (except a few, for integration with Project Builder). Seems like a nice tool to have around if you don't have BBEdit, or for using on machines that you don't do development on.
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Bare Bones Releases TextWrangler More

Bare Bones Releases TextWrangler

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  • I've never used BBEdit. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gnuadam ( 612852 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @11:48AM (#5379511) Journal

    What does it have that gvim or emacs doesn't that is worth $150?

    And don't tell me to RTFA, because I have, and I still don't have an answer to this. From the people that use BBEdit or are planning on using this new lite version, why?

    • Re:I've never used BBEdit. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by CableModemSniper ( 556285 ) <.moc.liamg. .ta. .odlapacnagol.> on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @11:58AM (#5379577) Homepage Journal
      Famlirity. BBEdit is the defacto Mac text editor for coders, IIRC. its like asking what does windows have that Linux doesn't for 200 dollars. Hmm maybe I shouldn't have used that example :)

      • Re:I've never used BBEdit. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Draoi ( 99421 ) <draiocht@@@mac...com> on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @12:23PM (#5379809)
        Furthermore, it 'feels' a lot like the editor which comes with the Metrowerks CodeWarrior IDE, which many MacOS developers will be familiar with. It also integrates well with cvs (you can do checkins and checkouts from within BBEdit) and you can do CodeWarrior compiles without leaving the editor. Not to mention HTML markup support as well as compliance checking and syntax colouring for just about any language, blah ... plugin support ... blah ... applescripting ... you get the picture!

        (Do I sound like a rabid fan? :-) )

      • its like asking what does windows have that Linux doesn't for 200 dollars.

        And that's my point. You can buy an *operating system* for about what they're charging. I paid $79 for jaguar. I mean all jokes about emacs taking over the world aside, it is *just* a text editor, right?

    • Re:I've never used BBEdit. (Score:5, Informative)

      by greenhide ( 597777 ) <jordanslashdot@NospAm.cvilleweekly.com> on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @12:06PM (#5379647)
      Ease of use.

      I've never used gvim, but I have tried to use vim and I find that it just isn't intuitive. Except for more complicated features, such as language recognition and learning RegEx, I've never had to look at the manual to figure out how to open, edit, save, copy, paste, etc in BBEdit.

      When I tried using vim, I instantly had to look up a manual to figure out how to do standard things like open and save files. Granted, it may have been the particular port I was using, but it seemed to me non-intuitive.

      I've used emacs in the past, but unless I'm mistaken it uses yanking and unyanking to cut and copy text, instead of the cut and paste I'm more familiar with. And again, I'm needing to look in the manual to figure out how to do extremely standard things, such as quiting the damn program.

      BBEdit has won huge support mostly because it has strictly adhered to Mac guidelines for user interfaces. This means that it pretty much will behave across the board exactly like I expect any Mac application to behave.

      • Re:I've never used BBEdit. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        That's pretty cool. I doubt you care, but here's the short version of why vi(m) is the way it is.

        It was designed that all of the functionality could be achieved from the home row of the keyboard, without chording (ex: ctrl-lshift-F3). It was designed as a 'multi mode' 'screen' editor. Multi mode means that there are 2 or more 'modes'. In vi, there's command, and input mode. In input, you type and it appears. In command, each of the keys do commands (ie: w takes you to the beginning of the next word, % goes to the matching bracket/paren, etc). A 'screen' editor (as opposed to a line editor like ed or ex) shows you more of the context around what your editing. Line editors only show you the line.

        Vi's not for those who like pretty, intuitive, and easy. Freely admitted. Vi's a power user's editor with a rather steep learning curve. I believe that it's paid off for me. You can do all sorts of crazy stuff with it in 2 or three keystrokes (for example: replace everything from the curser to the next instance of the string 'the': c/the).

        That said, I have gvim on this XP box, simply because it can deal with multi megabyte text files (usually log files) in a way that doesn't suck (unlike notepad or wordpad). There are probably other editors that do the same, but I don't know what they are.
      • Several of your problems with vim are solved in Gvim. The graphical version has pulldown menus for common tasks instead of having to memorize keystrokes. You will be faster if you know the keystrokes but not hindered by using the menus. There is an OSX native (Aqua) Gvim port as well which does not require use of the rootless X server to run.

        I use Gvim for most of my coding as I do not require moving files around or CVS integration. VI comes naturally to me as I learned it so long ago. It's kind of the same reason I am a Mac user, because my P's bought one for me about 20 years ago and that's what I'm used to...

        -Rusty
    • What does it have that gvim or emacs doesn't that is worth $150?

      Ease of use. :)

    • Shorter learning curve (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @01:28PM (#5380383) Journal
      BBEdit has a much shorter learning curve than emacs. OTOH, it's also much less powerful.

      [sigh] I remember when Bare Bones was a small company that made inexpensive products, and didn't try all this price discrimination crap.

      • BBEdit has a much shorter learning curve than emacs. OTOH, it's also much less powerful.

        If you take Lisp out of emacs, BBEdit is only somewhat less powerful. For everyday text editor users, BBEdit is a nice way to go.

        Still, I think it needs more features to compete with the editors I use on the Windows platform; which is a shame. Give BBEdit the kind of Unicode support found in TextEdit (in other words, thoroughly Cocoaize it) and include a nice little workspace pane like the one in HTML-Kit, and I'd never use Windows again.

    • Re:I've never used BBEdit. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Llywelyn ( 531070 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @02:49PM (#5381079) Homepage
      1) As others have mentioned, ease of use. This software is *dramatically* easier to use.

      2) It will run under MacOS X without an X11, xemacs won't and anything that runs in a terminal is automatically a few marks down on the ease-of-use scale. (I like the ability to click where I want my cursor).

      3) It is a lot prettier and conforms to the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines.

      4) Did I mention ease of use? Figuring out how to do things with BBedit is much easier than figuring out how to do things with emacs.

      5) The defaults aren't as strict. The defaults on emacs can be very strict as to the way it will structure things for you, BBEdit will let you do what you like without any configuration.

      6) I don't even know if emacs can do the gremlin-blasting and ASCIIification as nicely or as quickly as BBEdit can.

      7) The find-replace &c functions in BBEdit are easier to use (back to this same argument again) and much more intuitive to work with.

      8) There is no screen splitting, nor any real need for it.

      9) It feels faster. Not sure if it actually is, though I wouldn't doubt it since it runs natively under MacOS X while emacs goes through LISP (Lots of Insanely Stupid Parentheses).

      10) You can have the most powerful piece of software in the world, but if it is difficult to use or requires specialized knowledge, the only way it is going to get used is if the user has a pressing need for something that it offers (see MatLab or Mathematica). For a text editor, it doesn't matter to me if emacs will slice cheese and make fries if this other text editor will do everything I need it to (which does not include a cheese grater) more intuitively and simply coming out of the box.

      Yes, many of us consider that worth paying for :-)

      • Re:I've never used BBEdit. (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Actually, you can split the screen by moving your mouse over the grey bar above the scrollbar on the right, and then holding and dragging down. :-)

  • But they discontinued BBEditLite (Score:5, Informative)

    by Montreal ( 594947 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @11:54AM (#5379548)
    It is no more [barebones.com]. It is an ex-editor.
    • Damn, good thing I downloaded it yesterday. Fried my TiBook this weekend, had to reinstall everything. Guess in the nick of time too!

    • Re:But they discontinued BBEditLite (Score:4, Informative)

      by XnetZERO ( 560391 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @12:35PM (#5379907)
      I just downloaded BBeditLite from VersionTracker. Perhaps their FTP servers haven't gotten word. Though to be honest, I don't really see the point of BBeditLite. After having used the full version for so long, I can't do without its features and I'm only a casual user.

    • Re:But they discontinued BBEditLite (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Daniel Dvorkin ( 106857 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @01:52PM (#5380600) Homepage Journal
      I think that's a huge mistake, honestly. I used BBEdit Lite for a couple of years before I finally decided to bite the bullet and pay for BBEdit. It taught me how to use BBEdit generally (it's a very intuitive program overall, but it does have its quirks) and, more importantly, convinced me that a text editor might be worth paying for -- "If the free version does all this, how much more cool stuff will I get if I pay for it?" TextWrangler may be cheaper, but not enough cheaper to create a bunch of "casual" users who will eventually pay for the full version, which was what BBEdit Lite did.
    • That editor would "voom" if you put 4 million volts through it. It's bleeding demised. It's passed on. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If they hadn't nailed it to the server it'd be pushing up the daisies. It's curled up its tootsies, it's shuffled off this mortal coil. It's brung down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible! Vis a Vis the metabolic processes, he's had his lot! All statements to the effect that this editor is still a going concern are from now on inoperative!

      Hopefully the replacement isn't a talking slug.
    • http://macintosh.ozbytes.net.au/adnload/203923_819 77.html

      you can still snag it from here while it lasts!

  • BBEdit vs PB (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zephc ( 225327 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @11:55AM (#5379554)
    I have a copy of BBEdit Lite, but there must be a huge discrepincy between it and the full version, because while it has great search fascilities, it doesn't even have syntax coloring, which I have grown to like since my days using CodeWarrior.

    Project Builder has everything *I* need for coding. And whenever I do stuff at the command line, I tend to just use emacs. BBEdit Lite is only kept around as a quick(ish) text viewer. And I dont see myself forking over 180$ for a text editor anyway, when PB is free.

    • Re:BBEdit vs PB (Score:4, Informative)

      by Golias ( 176380 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @12:27PM (#5379834)
      I have a copy of BBEdit Lite, but there must be a huge discrepincy between it and the full version, because while it has great search fascilities, it doesn't even have syntax coloring, which I have grown to like since my days using CodeWarrior.

      There is.

      And yes, the full fersion has syntax coloring.

  • "while BBEdit sells for $179" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 3-State Bit ( 225583 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @12:14PM (#5379728)
    REALLY??
    I mean, I know lots, and lots of Geeks use BBEdit (to the point that people say it's good form to install [I suppose the free version of] it even on systems you won't be using it yourself on), but I never imagined it was so expansively great that someone would shell out that much money. It's a text editor! (Isn't it?)

    Can I hear from anyone who uses BBEdit -- what does it hvae that makes it so amazing?

    • Re:"while BBEdit sells for $179" (Score:5, Informative)

      by Golias ( 176380 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @12:34PM (#5379891)
      When I bought BBEdit for OS X from the Apple Store last summer, it was $89.

      It seems to me that the story here is not that they are splitting their product. It already was split. BBEdit was $89, and BBEdit Lite was free.

      Now it appears they have released a $49 app to replace the free one, and nearly doubled the price of the full version.

      The headline should have been "BBEdit decides to put the squeeze on their customers, announces it as a produict release."

      • okay. But my question was why people pay so much for text editing anyway. Tell me about why you payed $89 for a text editor... (I'm not saying it is or isn't worth it -- I just want to know how you use it).

        Thanks, Golias.
        • Please see above re: comments on ease of use.

          Basically, it is the best text editor out there that *acts* like a Mac program.

          BTW, I want to go on record as saying that I just downloaded emacs for OS X, carbonized and aquified and everything, and it looks little different than emacs running within a terminal window.

          However, since I'm increasingly using Linux (our shop is moving from almost all Windows/IIS servers to Linux/Apache), I'll probably take the time at some point to teach myself emacs (*never* vi. I hate that text editor, and I doubt that anything will ever happen to change my feelings about it).
      • When I bought BBEdit for OS X from the Apple Store last summer, it was $89. It seems to me that the story here is not that they are splitting their product. It already was split. BBEdit was $89, and BBEdit Lite was free. Now it appears they have released a $49 app to replace the free one, and nearly doubled the price of the full version.
        Are you sure you weren't paying for an upgrade, or a competitive sidegrade, or some other special introductory offer? BBEdit has been its current price for a while...and worth every penny, IMHO.

      • Re:"while BBEdit sells for $179" (Score:4, Informative)

        by pudge ( 3605 ) <{ten.egdup} {ta} {todhsals}> on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @02:03PM (#5380714) Homepage Journal
        You paid a discounted price. TextWrangler might have discounted prices at some point, too. But full retail is $179 vs. $49. Go look [barebones.com].

        Also, TextWrangler != BBEdit Lite. Different things. BBEdit Lite had a lot of the software development features of BBEdit. TextWrangler doesn't have those, but it does have all the text editing features of BBEdit 7 that BBEdit Lite does not have. They are both subsets of BBEdit, but different subsets.

        And, of course, to complain that a company is no longer giving something away for free is pretty stupid on its face. Boo hoo.
        • I went back and looked. BBEdit may be $179 now, but it was usually about $120 then, depending on where you bought it.

          The differences between TextWrangler & BBE Lite makes sense. Still, I find it kind of baffling that they are dropping Lite. It was the perfect "gateway drug" to get people to buy the full app. (At least, that strategy worked on me...)

          • Well, yeah, but you can still download it and use it in demo mode. That's something. And BBEdit Lite is still available (from Bare Bones FTP server, no less ... grab it while you can :-).

            Anyway, I assume, pending evidence to the contrary, that BBEdit knows what is best for its market, or what it needs to do to remain in business, or whatever. Good luck to them. I think $49 is a bit steep; I think $30 or $35 would be great. But they'll find out!
        • Also, TextWrangler != BBEdit Lite. Different things. BBEdit Lite had a lot of the software development features of BBEdit. TextWrangler doesn't have those...
          I haven't used TextWrangler myself yet, but from reading this [barebones.com] I think you're mistaken.

          "TextWrangler 1.0: All the functionality of BBEdit Lite, plus..."

          I'm bitter because BBEdit 6.5 came out as a for-pay upgrade ($19 upgrade price) right after I bought 6.0. I've been putting off buying 6.5, and now I'm glad I did, because I see 7.0 is out already. I think asking customers to pay for updates more than once a year is bad form. Then again, bare bones is one of the few commercial software companies who's software I'm willing to pay for at all (yarr, I used to be a pirate, but now I'm just using more Free software). Since TextWrangler is essentially them saying "our previously free lite editor now costs money", I can't say this betters my opinion of bare bones any :(
          • The upgrade price directly from 6.0 to 6.5 was a lot more than $19, iirc. More like $49, I think, which is the price of the upgrade from 6.5 to 7.0. And many of us bought the program when there was an upgrade price from BBEdit Lite (free) to BBEdit ($79, or so).

    • Re:"while BBEdit sells for $179" (Score:5, Informative)

      by Alderete ( 12656 ) <{moc.eteredla} {ta} {todhsals}> on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @01:14PM (#5380243) Homepage
      Can I hear from anyone who uses BBEdit -- what does it hvae that makes it so amazing?

      I have been using (and paying for) BBEdit since version 3.something. It is the one piece of Mac OS software for which I order the upgrade first, and look at the new features second. It is one of my favorite pieces of software of all time. I've paid far more than $179 for my copies and upgrades, and consider it money well spent.

      If you are a happy vi[m] or emacs user, don't bother to check BBEdit out. You won't like it, for the same reason that, while I can get around, I hate using vi (and never touch emacs). It's a different philosophy of application design.

      BBEdit is a Mac OS application first. It conforms to all of the usual HI guidelines, but goes beyond that to provide an extremely well-designed, high-efficiency interface -- for Mac OS users. (vi folks will no doubt compare keystrokes to do the same task; apples to oranges, Mac OS folks don't want to have separate modes for commands vs. input. It goes back to the application philosophy.)

      In spite of being Mac OS first, it provides nearly all of the tools and features you'd want in a text editor. Text munging, search-and-replace, grep manipulation, selection of columns, HTML-specific commands, glossaries, syntax highlighting, etc. I've yet to find its equal in a GUI-oriented application. (My favorite on Windows is TextPad, but it's a distant second.)

      If you're a vi man, skip BBEdit. But if you're a Mac OS person, or aspiring to be so, you should give it a whirl.

    • Re:"while BBEdit sells for $179" (Score:4, Informative)

      by analog_line ( 465182 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @02:59PM (#5381165)
      There is something hard to explain about BBEdit. It just seems to make text manipulation...fun. It's got that je ne sais qua. Possessing probably the best catch phrase in software, "It Doesn't Suck," it really doesn't. The tools it gives you are an HTML writer's dream. Macromedia, way back at the first release of Dreamweaver for the Mac, originally just gave you a full BBEdit license in with the deal, and BBEdit integration is still in there today. It looks nice. Everything is well laid out. Feature-for-feature, vi and emacs almost certainly would pound it to the dirt, but the GUI versions of both of those editors are ugly and act like the kludges of terminal mode applications that they are. I like vi in terminal mode, but in a window manager, resizing a terminal and getting the font to a different size just for text editing is an unecessary hassle. BBEdit fits into the MacOS GUI like it was born there, even in Aqua. It's completely scriptable with AppleScript, to the point of providing the AppleScript menu even if you don't enable it in general. I bought a full version of BBEdit 6.5 (first version with native OSX support) when I got my iBook after a long absence from the Mac, and I use it for everything possible. I don't use Office X, or AppleWorks, or Text Edit (which does RTF, not text) for my word processing. Just BBEdit. I try to find ways to use it, just because I enjoy using it. I even bought Mailsmith so I could have a BBEdit interface to my e-mail, but I had to stop using it because aside from the editing functions, it's just not there yet as far as the networking/speed is concerned (but that's another discussion). I haven't thought

      As someone who started out on the Mac, BBEdit was one of the most amazing utilities I had ever seen back in '97 when I first looked at BBEdit Lite. It was fast. You didn't have to go through huge text files by hand deleting billions of windows or unix line breaks, because BBEdit could figure it out. (No scripting this operation didn't always work. I tried, oh gods, how I tried...the tools I had available didn't cut the mustard) It looked nice, as opposed to the horrendous TeachText and SimpleText. You could open almost any file and BBEdit would just open it, and you could mess around (whether you should or not). For some of us old Mac guys, I admit, we can tend to get very zealous about BBEdit, because of all that. Hell, when I dropped the Mac at home because I decided I wanted to play games, the one thing I missed more than anything else from the Mac was my BBEdit Lite.

      If the concept of a text editor GUI galls or amuses you, BBEdit isn't for you. Go use vi or emacs and be happy. But if you don't find the concept silly, or you've used other GUI text editors, you owe it to yourself to at least take a look at BBEdit.

    • It doesn't suck.®. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dpbsmith ( 263124 )
      That's been their slogan for as long as I can remember:

      BBEdit. It doesn't suck.®.

      In this day and age, that is a truly remarkable claim for any piece of software, and in my opinion it makes BBEdit truly amazing.

    • Why BBEdit rocks. Back in the day, I loved BBEdit's MPW integration. Since MPW is no more, I'll stick to those features that are still relevant. I haven't used it in years since I don't work at the same place, but this is what I remember:

      Edit over FTP. Great for fixing problems on websites where the host won't give you shell access.

      Works with perl. I hear that it works with the perl in OS X now. Before It worked with MacPerl for OS 9. It gives you a real perl IDE with syntax checking and everything.

      Regex search and replace. Need I say more?

      Unlimited undos - before they became common.

      Built in diff. Now I use Apple's FileMerge, but BBEdit's was damned good.

      Built in HTML reference form many tags and all ascii entities.

      HTML validator.

      AppleScriptability.

      HTTP download. There was a pluggin that let you doiwnload data from any http url into a text file, headers and all.

      Most importantly, I work faster in BBEdit than any other editor. I fell better working. I don't feel like I'm fighting the editor just to get my work done. I use Emacs and JEdit for similar reasons, but for just getting my work done, neither holds a candle to BBEdit. I've requested a Mac at work. One of the main reasons was so that so that I could code in BBEdit again.

      If I get the cash, I'll buy it. Yes it is worth it.

  • Advertising as News (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by V. Mole ( 9567 )

    I hope Slashdot got paid for this advertisement. I mean, it's one thing to have a little info-post about a unusual or useful free project, but this is pretty much a straight-up ad for a commercial product. Why this one, and not any of the other umpteen-jillion "press releases" that are published everyday?

    • Why this one, and not any of the other umpteen-jillion "press releases" that are published everyday?

      Well, they didnt' put this on the /. front page; they put it in the Apple section. To Apple users this is news. Anything that happens with Toast, BBEdit or Photoshop is going to be of interest to 90% of the Mac users out there.

      That said, this "paid advertisement" is not good news. The news that BBEdit Lite might be going away to be replaced by a $49 product that nobody will want, while the cost of BBEdit itself has shot through the roof, makes this a potentially dark day for Mac users.

  • Great! Now I can finally pay them. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @12:27PM (#5379838) Homepage
    I've used and loved the freeware BBEdit Lite for, five? six? years now. It's just a perfect little gem. Everything I needed and nothing I didn't need. Opens big files beautifully. Fast, efficient, no bloat.

    When I emailed them to mention that it had some issues running under Classic in OS X, they informed me that there WAS an OS X native version of BBEdit Lite, and that in fact it had gone through two major revs since I downloaded it. I hadn't even known, because BBEdit Lite was so satisfactory that I never got around to checking for updates!

    It was at about that time that I tried to get them to accept a completely voluntary $30 donation for BBEdit Lite. I really didn't want or need the features of the full BBEdit, but I did feel that I morally "owed" them for BBEdit Lite.

    They refused to accept my payment!

    So, while I am very disappointed that they have withdrawn BBEdit Lite, nevertheless I will happily purchase TextWrangler, because I think it's above time I paid them back for all the use I've gotten out of BBEdit Lite over all these years.

    No, I'm not shilling for them, and, yes, I'm perfectly sincere.

    BBEdit Lite was just plain NICE, and I hope TextWrangler continues that tradition.

  • Mixed feelings... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by singularity ( 2031 ) <nowalmart.gmail@com> on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @12:34PM (#5379895) Homepage Journal
    I bought the full version of BBEdit back when they were having specils for upgrades from BBEditLite for something like $69. This was under OS 8, so it was a version or so ago.

    When I moved to OS X Bare Bones was requiring me to purchase another (discounted) full version, so I stuck with BBEditLite under OS X.

    Lite was doing about 95% of what I wanted. I missed some of the features of the full version, but definitely not enough to pay $100+ to get them. The few features I was looking for could be replaced by other methods (Although admittedly not nearly as well as having them integrated into BBEdit). I kept wondering why I saw the full version being updated regularly and BBEditLite not getting updates (In the past BareBones was good about releasing bug fixes for the Lite version within a day or two of the full version).

    Now I am not sure if I am going to shell out $50 for TextWrangler. That would mean that I would be paying a total of over $100 to BareBones in the past few years and getting fewer features than their full product.

    I am leaning towards doing it, though, since I know the BareBones people to be good people. It is often I will see one of their developers posting on comp.sys.mac.* to answer questions about BBEdit and MailSmith (their mail client).

    They also sent me a nice T-shirt many years ago for building my web site with BBEdit...

    Ahh, the joys of the dot.bomb age...
    • First, I love BBEdit, and have loyally paid for it + upgrades since version 3.0. I recently had to reinstall my system (OS X) and I reinstalled BBEdit and I made 2 accounts, an admin and a user. I put my serial # in for BBEdit under the admin account (version 7.0.1) and then when I logged in as the user, my normal account, it asked me for the number again. But it will not accept the same serial number! Do I have to reinstall everything to use it? I want access to it from both accounts and I am the same person in both cases (and it's on the same computer). Do they expect me to pay twice or am I doing something moronic here?
      • The serial number is stored in /Users/yourusername/Library/Preferences/BBEdit Preferences/BBEdit Serial Number

        You can toss that file and experiment again, or perhaps copy that file to the corresponding place in each user folder.
  • How does this stand up to the free TextEdit bundled in Jaguar? I have spell check and a couple of other features that really take the place of something like this.
    • That's like asking how Photoshop compares to Preview. Read the link that shows the features.
      • No it's completely different. They're very similar, in their functonality. It's a text editor and so is textwrangler. There is no editing capability in Preview.
        • Um, No.

          Pay attention now, I'm going to look at their feature chart (something you obviously have never done).

          I will show a list of things that TextWranger has that TextEdit does not and never will (this is not a complete list, this is just a few things that matter):

          0) Default to text, rather than rich text.
          1) regexp searching (!!!!!!)
          2) Multi-file search
          3) Plug-In Support
          4) Sorting
          5) Zap Gremlins
          6) Entab/Detab
          7) Save in a variety of file formats.
          8) Unicode
          9) Will save with Unix line-breaks (if you do *any* kind of shell scripting or hand-modifying files, this is a /necessity/.)
          10) Auto-indent
          11) SYNTAX COLORING
          12) Can function as an external editor w/ project builder.
          13) Emacs Keybinding (your choice)
          14) Will open any file up to 2GB in size (RAM restricting, of course)
          15) View directory listings.
          16) FTP SUPPORT!

          If these things aren't important to you, then don't buy it--no one is forcing you to.

          In the meantime, however, this is like comparing Preview to Photoshop--not that one of them can't edit, its that one of them is *so much more powerful* than the other one.

          Next time, RTFM.

  • JEdit fills the void! (Score:4, Informative)

    by caulfield ( 39545 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @12:57PM (#5380077) Homepage
    Just my $0.02, but JEdit [jedit.org] fills the gap that BBEdit Lite leaves, and has all of the (and more) capabilities of BBEdit Lite with the added bonus of being cross-platform.

    • Re:JEdit fills the void! (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      jedit... yeah right.

      let's see...

      slow...check!
      ugly interface...check!
      open sores...check!

    • I agree, except that I wouldn't restrict the claim to BBEdit Lite. Just started using a Mac in November, had heard that BBEdit was the text editor, & I love me some text editors. Downloaded the trial, it was fine, but I do as much XML as anything these days. I'm _real_ hooked on being able to reference a DTD & get a pull-down menu of valid/required elements. JEdit for me, so that I can have the same editor on the 3 platforms I use. Well, that, and SciTE, especially since I've had some memory problems with the last couple of pre-s with JEdit. Love me some SciTE, too.
    • I found JEdit and started using it on Win2k at work. It is the best text editor (besides BBEdit) that I have ever used. Some of the plugins for java development are the cat's ass, and it does a lot right. I was doing some Java development at home at the time (playing with Robocode) and I wanted to use the java compiler plugin, because BBEdit 6.1 did not have a similar option. However, I found that Robocode would grind to a halt (1-2 fps) when jEdit was running concurrently. Quit jEdit and my framerate jumped to around 12 fps. I don't see this kind of a performance hit when running jEdit/Robocode at work (don't tell my boss!), so I'm guessing that there is some issue with the java runtime in OS X. Either way, I paid $49 for my upgrade to version 7 of BBEdit, which allows me to run UNIX commands from command windows (step in the way-back machine: we're doing the MPW shuffle!), including javac, so it's all moot in the end. Summary: jEdit on Win2K, good, on OS X, bad!
    • Interestingly enough, I use jEdit happily on my (400 MHz G3) Mac, but find it too slow to be usable on my (XP 2100) PC. So I find myself with two great editors available for the Mac (though I don't own BBEdit, it is available), and none I know of for Windows ... Which sucks really bad right now since my Mac is temporarily out of commission.

      -- shayborg
  • I've been programming since I could touch type, and I must say that BBEdit is an awesome text editor. First I used the Lite version. It held me over for a long time, mostly I was dissapointed at the lack of syntax highlighting. When Mac OS X came out I started to use emacs. I've used it so much the commands are hard wired into my head. I realized that no matter how good I got with my terminal emacs I needed a GUI to squeeze even more productivity out of my time developing. So I bought BBEdit. I have no regrets. All the emacs commands work in BBEdit, it has syntax highlighting, auto-indent, its own mini FTP and File Browser. The Shell worksheets are a huge help for when I am doing large scale rennovations of my system. I've even found some of the third party plugins helpful. I was most impressed with the HTML tools that it came with; I can churn out style sheets twice as fast as I used to using BBEdit. It's much better than the built in editor for PB.

    If Bare Bones is putting forth the effort to make Text Wrangler a lower cost alternative to BBEdit then I must say it will be worth every last penny.

  • bizarre (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @02:22PM (#5380868)
    Okay, from their web page comparing the two, they say that TextWrangler has "Syntax coloring and function navigation for ANSI C, C++, and Objective-C", but only BBEdit has that for web stuff like HTML, etc.

    Isn't that a little backward? You'd think the little brother would have the HTML stuff and only the big brother would have the stuff for "programming".

    I also wonder about the name - shouldn't it have been something more similar to BBEdit? Like babyBBEdit? Or BabyBB? Maybe (BB^2)Edit? Or just go with all lowercase - bbedit. And on a related note, what do the two B's in 'BB' (the little metal projectiles) stand for, anyway?

    And why am I in this handbasket?
    • I thought that was weird too. ProjectBuilder satisfies my code-editing needs, but I could use an editor with HTML syntax checking.

      Yet BareBones have decided to go after ProjectBuilder, and leave the under-$100 HTML editor market completely.

      Huh?!

      Oh well, I'm happy enough with vim. BBEdit is better, but it's not $180 better.

    • Re:bizarre (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 )
      Project Builder and Vi/Emacs are priced at $0. They are widely accepted by the mac dev community. Mac based web developers, on the other hand, all need the workflow, ease of use, and power of BBEdit.

      A cheaper HTML BBEdit would cannibalize their sales. Most of the price conscious developers have already switched to emacs, vi, and project builder. This may stem the tide a bit, or even draw back some folks that prefer the BBEdit interface.

      What do I know? I code VB for a living, so: Nothing.

      • um, (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Bare Bones Edit?
    • However I agree some HTML stuff would be more useful.

    • Re: bizarre (Score:2, Informative)

      by holygoat ( 564732 )
      Just in case someone misunderstands, to quote from the page:

      " All the functionality of TextWrangler, plus..."

      So BBEdit has everything.

      As to why to limit it to programming stuff: programmers are cheap bastards, web designers aren't. At least, that's what I expect (being a programmer!). I also would assume a text editor to have C/C++ highlighting - but not necessarily HTML highlighting.

      BB stands for 'Bare Bones', the name of the company.
  • I've been using BBEdit since version 4 (five years ago?). I was pretty much a hardcore Mac geek back then (thank goodness for the mellowness of age), and BBEdit was one of my primary reasons for defending the Mac platform.

    Today I'm a freelance web developer, writing apps in Perl, PHP, ASP, and of course straight up HTML. BBEdit has been an invaluable tool for my work, and along with OS X's fantastic networking support, I can edit all of my Mac, Unix, and Windows projects from my lone G4 workstation. The CVS integration in version 7 is fantastic...I now use it to manage version control for all those disparate projects. It's a beautiful thing.

    However, I am also saddened to read that BBEdit Lite is gone. I would never have become a hardcore BBEdit user if it weren't for the Lite version to help me get my feet wet. I'd probably still be stuck at some ad agency creating web pages in Dreamweaver (ick) or GoLive (double ick!). I worry that new adoption of BBEdit will come to a halt.

    At the same time, they deserve the money. Not only does BareBones make some great applications, but their customer service is tremendous. On more than one occasion I've bitched at them for this or that, and they've always responded quickly and courteously, even when I've been wrong. I even had a brief e-mail chat with one of their developers discussing the pros and cons of tabbed documents.

    So, on the one hand, their apps rule; on the other hand, they may be shooting themselves and future developers in the foot for charging for what was once free; on the third hand, their apps still rule, as does their customer support, and this should be worth a few bucks to people.

    Today's word is "ambivalence."
    • Me too. Great software...always has been. I always compare other same type apps to BBEdit.

      And I happily paid for a 6.x version mid-2002. When the upgrade to 7.x came out, and I saw the price, for the first time I stopped and asked if I was really interested. I've never questioned paying for BBEdit until now, but when the pricing structure for 7.x hit, I began to wonder if it was a tool I really needed. I don't think I'll follow along this time. I'm sure someone else will enter the market and replace BBEdit with the traditional no-limits text editing we've all enjoyed for so long. If BBEdit wants to be a major developer app, that's fine, but all I need is a text editor that can open any sized file, provide line numbers, and global search/replace.
    • I share Suffering Bastard's ambivalence. BBEdit is a great tool for an incredibly wide range of text-editing tasks, and does it all while being very faithful to Apple's HI guidelines. What I like best about BBEdit is that it doesn't get in your way, or try to make decisions for you (which is what I hate about Dreamweaver and the other WYSIWYG apps), but has readily available all kinds of assistance if you decide you need it. As someone else on this thread said, it somehow makes text-editing and coding fun. Hard to explain.

      BUT: Bare Bones' pricing is getting WAY out of line (not only with BBEdit but also with Mailsmith, a very cool app that isn't making a lot of headway in a field crowded with cheaper or free alternatives), and it's hard to see how they're going to be competitive in the long run. I hope they figure out how to strike the right balance, because they're a great company and they make uniquely useful products.
  • After e-mailing Bare Bones about the lack of BBEdit Lite, he pointed out that there's a demo version [barebones.com] of TextWrangler [barebones.com], with the standard 30-day trial period. Now, I've been using BBEdit Lite for well more than 30 days, and I'm probably going to get the full version soon, but I doubt after only 30 days I would've had enough use of it to buy a pay version.

  • BBEdit Lite still at download.com (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jcsehak ( 559709 ) on Tuesday February 25, 2003 @06:37PM (#5383129) Homepage
    You can still get bbedit lite 6.1, which includes an os x native version, at download.com. If Bare Bones is phasing out bbedit lite, you might want to get it soon. I just got it, and it kicks ass. I was looking for a simple text editor to replace the non-existant simpletext in os x, and it fits the bill perfectly Plus, it's way better in so many ways.

    • Yes (Score:2)

      by sulli ( 195030 )
      I love BBEdit Lite and use it all the time. $179 is too damn much for full BBEdit, but like the other poster I may buy TextWrangler to support BB.

      Too bad they pulled Lite [barebones.com] though. If you can still get it, try it, it's awesome.

  • On Windows I use UltraEdit. I like it. It has color syntax and it has line numbers. Line numbers are really important to me as I write horrible, horrible code and I:

    use warnings ;

    Is BBEdit any good at this?

    I use X/Emacs on OS X (my home, and fuzziest OS.)

    I'll pay but I hardly ever write HTML.
    • Yes, it does line numbers (can be turned on or off), and it lets you run the Perl from a menu. (Ditto Python). Allows you to syntax check Perl programs too.
    • BBEdit has perl syntax as well, but unless the file browser/network integration/CVS integration is something you really could use, then it's probably not worth the full $180 for BBEdit full version, and unless you a lot of looking at text files, Text Wrangler may not be worth it for you either. Look around for the latest version of BBEdit Lite and take a look. If you like it, Text Wrangler may be something to look at then.

      I don't use a quarter of all the features BBEdit has to offer, but I just think the Bare Bones guys rule, and I'd frame my BBEdit t-shirt if I got my hands on another one to wear. But I'm kinda crazy that way. Money well spent.

    • BBEdit is great for writing PERL or just about any code you can think of. Yes, BBEdit supports line-numbering.

      Of course, whether you're working in UltraEdit or BBEdit or NotePad or SimpleText, when you're debugging PERL it's PERL and not your editor that will be telling you what's working and what's not.

  • More and more, I've found that to be such a fitting description of BBEdit. Sounds like for the Mac Unix folks out there it may even qualify as "Insanely Great", but I'm a web developer and every time I have to take my right hand off the keyboard to reach for the mouse to click on the tool bar, activate a menu command, or check off boxes in a dialog, I wind up losing time and productivity. Homesite has always been a superior tool for coding in markup languages, particularly because of its tag insight and tag completion features. When Macromedia bought Allaire I was hoping we'd finally get Homesite on the Mac, but it looks like they (Macromedia) have folded it into Dreamweaver MX. It's a shame BBEdit never looked into something along the same lines. Forget about any arguments about "product distinction" or anything like that -- Adobe and Macromedia know well enough to copy features of the other's software when it makes sense. XML Spy takes Homesite's tag insight one better by generating pop-up menu content based on your DTD/schema, so its not like there isn't any precedent for other programs using this feature either.

    Looks like I have something to look forward to with BBEdit, tho, since I'm trying to learn more about what I can do with the Unix under the hood....

  • try mi (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    does way more than TextWrangler... maybe less than BBEdit, but I am not so sure. I have been using mi for a month now and have found it to be everything I wanted in a code/text editor.

    did I mention it was free?

    http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~gf6d-kmym/en/
  • I use BBEdit 7.0 for almost all our development work (ASP, PHP and XML). I think the $179 list price is a bit inflated, I bought 6.5 for $79 at their website (you download the lite version and that was enough to qualify for the "competitive" upgrade to the pro version). Less than two months later Barebones moved up to 7.0, and my purchase fell within the grace period for a free upgrade. My previous weapon of choice was Edit Plus (back when I was still in windows) and even if I absolutely loved it, its developers sort of left it hanging for a long time. I used Edit Plus for many years because the cliptext function was ideal for ASP programming and it did not add any weird gremlins to text files.

    Within a week of using BBEdit I was completely weaned-off Edit Plus. Cliptext only allows one substitution, while the BBEdit glossary facility allows you to substitute for whatever you have highlighted, plus whatever is on the clipboard. Plus extra dynamic tags you can use for that. You can of course combine the glossary with GREP patterns and Applescript for some truly evil automation.

    The stripped-off tool is just another way of Barebones showing off how they listen to their customers. In every instance that I have had to contact them, they have been very quick and professional. Many times I have emailed them with "hints" for a next version only to have them reply with the page of the manual that explains a function that does exactly what I want to.
  • TextWrangler is a tweener that's not all that practical. The problem boils down to the fact that BBEdit Lite is free, BBEdit is worth the money if you need an UltraEdit [ultraedit.com] equivalent on the Mac, and the in-between niches are already fairly well taken up by other free alternatives. Luckily for BareBones, I think they just have to pick out some bits of BBEdit and they can "release" TextWrangler more or less for free. It's not like they're really out anything for releasing this, and it brings the flagship a little more exposure (and highlights some of its lesser known features).

    Most of the features (which can be found listed in comparison to BBEdit Lite here [barebones.com]) aren't things you'll need in a true text editor. I mean come on, how much code do you hack that's in Unicode? Rather, of the people that do hack code, how many of *them* need Unicode? And if you're hacking Unicode and need spellcheck (ie, not coding at all), well, you're better off (if only b/c you saved $50) just using TextEdit (Apple's free text/rtf editor) anyway.

    The feature of TextWrangler I like the most is "Optional Emacs keybinding support". Heh. If you want Emacs keybinding, I think I can find something that'll do that in an even more Emacs-like fashion [members.shaw.ca].

    If you need a powerful text editor that's Mac friendly, shell out for BBEdit. I just can't see there being much middle ground. But again, from BareBones point of view, they're out next to nothing and get to have all the coverage of a "brand new text editor".
  • In their latest point release (7.0.2), BBEdit has fixed my single longstanding complaint: character encoding support.

    I write most of my PHP scripts using Quanta, 'cause it's a pretty good editor and the syntax highlighting works well.But most of all, I can write text in French, with accents, which will be served up nicely by Apache to all comers, be they Mac, Windows, or Linux.

    This works because my Linux boxes use ISO Latin 1 encoding, Quanta saves files using that text encoding, and Apache serves them as such.

    Windows doesn't seem to have any problems reading these files, but they're a pain in the butt to edit on the Mac, in both Mac OS X and previous OS releases;

    If I open one of these files in BBEdit version 7.0.1 or previous, most of the accents I use (like éèçàù or â î û) turn into other, ugly, wierd-ass non-corresponding accented characters.

    Just-released version 7.0.2 adds support for many more encodings beyond UTF and MacRoman offered by previous versions: additional Unicode oprions, ISO Latin 1 and 9, along with Windows Latin 1 for Europe, and Korean, Chineese, and Japanese.

    Why such a major feature sneaks in a point release is beyond me. I've been paying my upgrades since version 4.5. It has cost me between 35 and 75 bucks a pop, but I've really felt that is was money well spent for Software That Doesn't Suck.

    For me, BBEdit's killer feature is function popup menus which put up a list (optionally alphabetically sorted) in the toolbar.

    I just click the function popup menu, and all the functions I've defined in the script are a single mouseclick away. Being able to instantly jump to a function I've defined is the single most useful editor function I've seen for programming.
  • Hello,

    I used BBEdit for years and loved it. I was power user and a tinkerer. I found many hidden features and exploited them. I thought it might be the Best Text Editor Ever.

    Then I started looking at unix text editors, especially XEmacs and vim. They were both harder to use initially, but I eventually felt more productive in either one than in BBEdit, both because of the feature sets, but also because of the keyboard short cuts and the ability to run in a terminal.

    Now vim is my preferred editor on OS X, and I only fire up BBEdit when I have to. Details here [stosberg.com].

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