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Utilities (Apple) Businesses Software Apple

Bare Bones Celebrates 10th Anniversary 81

Posted by pudge from the without-bbedit-i-would-not-even-have-an-ass-to-save dept.
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 ...
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Bare Bones Celebrates 10th Anniversary More

Bare Bones Celebrates 10th Anniversary

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  • Pricey (Score:5, Interesting)

    by colonel.sys ( 525119 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @08:55AM (#6047252)
    Yes, BB is pretty cool. But:

    I had used the Lite version for quite a while and when they started charging for that, Hydra came along and made me switch (http://hydra.globalse.org) -- pretty cool program. Group-Editing with Rendezvous, freeware and such.

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

    • Re:Pricey (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dogzilla ( 83896 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @09:21AM (#6047551) Homepage
      I agree that BBEdit is getting a little pricey, but Hydra really isn't comparable to BBEdit yet. It has some cool features, and certainly shows a lot of promise, but comparing any current version of BBEdit to Hydra at this point just makes Hydra look like "My First Text Editor".

      I'd gladly consider an alternative to BBEdit (especially if someone could replicate the Allaire Homesite file-management and tabbed editing interface on the Mac (why is this so hard? Does noone else find it annoying to have 15 windows open at the same time?). If that alternative turns out to be Hydra, so much the better since I dig it's collaborative features. But right now Hydra's basically a one-trick pony - it's TextEdit with Rendezvous and syntax coloring. Seems to me it needs way more functionality before it can stand next to BBEdit (compare the two search/replace windows for a quick example of how far Hydra needs to go).

      • Re:Pricey (Score:3, Interesting)

        by kosibar ( 671097 )
        The two features I find the most important in a text editor are FTP and tabbed editing. I often find that I have 10 windows open for one project, and a couple of windows for another project that a customer called me about and I'm waiting for a call back... gets to be a mess! (Especially when two of them are the same filename from a different site.)

        Having a separate window for each project I have open, then tabs for the individual files, would be absolutely perfect! Heck, I'd even pay the $250 ($225) to get

        • Re:Pricey (Score:3, Interesting)

          by pudge ( 3605 ) *
          I love using Interarchy for edit via FTP, especially now that it does SFTP. It has a feature to "Edit with BBEdit," and automatically saves changes when you save in BBEdit. Much nicer than using BBEdit's built-in FTP (which I used before this feature was added to Interarchy).

          • Edit by FTP (Score:2, Informative)

            by kosibar ( 671097 )
            Transmit has a similar feature, but I haven't looked into how it works yet. I think I'll have to take a look at that. Thanks for the tip!

            Still no tabs, though. :-(
            • The sad thing is that Mac OS basically had the tabs problem solved, with WindowShade. Yes, there is "haxie" for it in Mac OS X, but haxies give my computers fits (no offense to the cool Unsanity folks, I just got sick of random errors and crashes caused by things that patch my system :-).
          • so does transmit.

        • Having a separate window for each project I have open, then tabs for the individual files, would be absolutely perfect! Heck, I'd even pay the $250 ($225) to get that CD if it were the only way to get it. It's that valueable to me.

          I've never used them, but maybe filesets will help solve this problem?

      • Re:Pricey (Score:4, Insightful)

        by kuwan ( 443684 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @01:42PM (#6050151) Homepage
        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.
      • I'd .. (especially ,,, Mac (why ... time?)... BBEdit (compare ... go).

        )

        Your LISP is rusty, eh?

        =0) ~percepto

      • Have you tried jEdit? It rules. http://www.jedit.org/ [jedit.org]

        Additional information at http://community.jedit.org/index.php [jedit.org]

        It's written in Java, but it's still fast, and you can run it on all the platforms you might have at home or work. You can also very easily emulate most of the features you mentioned: tabbed documents, file management, syntax highlighting, etc. Plus, it is very extensible with macros, reconfigurable key shortcuts, plug-ins, etc. Try it!

        Perhaps best of all, it's free (as in beer)!

        Download [jedit.org]

      • especially if someone could replicate the Allaire Homesite file-management and tabbed editing interface on the Mac (why is this so hard? Does noone else find it annoying to have 15 windows open at the same time?)

        I asked BBEdit about tabbed windows once. Here is the brief e-mail conversation:

        Suffering Bastard: ...a tabbed window interface would be REALLY nice, although BBEdit is the best of its kind on any platform.

        Patrick Woolsey of BBEdit: As for a tabbed window interface, I will spare you the go

    • Re:Pricey (Score:2, Informative)

      by Feral Bueller ( 615138 )
      You can still get BBEdit Lite -- it's just harder to find:

      http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/vs_ Lite.shtml [barebones.com]

      It's also stuck on Version 6.1 apparently.

    • Re:Pricey (Score:2, Informative)

      by WeirdKid ( 260577 )
      $179 is quite high for this sort of thing. But it's got a loyal following from the early Mac days that will pay (or at least talk their bosses into paying). I wonder how many people would shell out the cash if it came out of their own pocket? I'm sure there are some who do, but not me. In this vein, it's a lot like IntelliJ or SlickEdit.

      When the freeware 6.1 version for OSX started getting crashy, I switched to JEdit [jedit.org]. Ant and CVS integration, autocompletion, code refactoring, you-name-it plugins. It'
  • ...which is why I'll save the $250 for web hosting costs.

  • BBedit going out with a bang? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jeeves99 ( 187755 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @09:06AM (#6047371)
    Web-design has evolved into its own art form. More and more webpages are popping up with elaborate layering schemes and graphical widgets. Toss in some php scripts and you've created a beautiful mess that one could never code by hand.

    Along this vein, does BBedit stand a chance any more? I for one have switched to Dreamweaver. When I need to edit the source, dreamweaver has a more than adequete color-schemed text interface.

    I admit this limited-CD release is a really cool idea, but it rings a little too loud as a final hurrah of an obsolete product.

    • Re:BBedit going out with a bang? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pudge ( 3605 ) * <slashdot@@@pudge...net> on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @09:24AM (#6047581) Homepage Journal
      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.

      • [...] it is much better as a general developer's text editor [...]

        Seriously, did you try a decent editor? BBEdit has no easy to use scratch macros (if macros at all?), its column selection is a joke (doesn't extend past the text, can't paste as columns), the syntax highlight isn't user configurable, it hasn't got overwrite mode, freehanded (non-restrained) cursor movement, auto-completion (or just completion), doesn't use the user configurable OS X key bindings (and the default values doesn't conform to

    • Re:BBedit going out with a bang? (Score:5, Informative)

      by michaelggreer ( 612022 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @09:27AM (#6047620)
      I've been coding my pages in xhtml and css, so the layout is separated from the content. When making JSPs for such pages, BBEdit has been wonderful, and Dreamweaver is useless. Dreamweaver is great for some kinds of pages, but is incredibly slow and buggy on the Mac. I mean, terrible. BBEdit just does what it claims, and I have used it since its inception.

      • I have to disagree. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by BoomerSooner ( 308737 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @10:48AM (#6048436) Homepage Journal
        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:I have to disagree. (Score:2, Insightful)

          by ins0m ( 584887 )
          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.
          • I like it a lot and use it frequently (almost as much as textpad). However in GUI I still prefer Textpad to GVIM or VIM in a console. Plus for some reason I could never get GVIM to store my damn font preferences! lol... oh well.

    • Re:BBedit going out with a bang? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jcbphi ( 235355 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @10:17AM (#6048137) Homepage
      Some would argue that in the long run, when your beautiful mess isn't rendering properly and its time to debug your HTML+CSS+PHP+who-knows-what, you may regret not knowing the intricacies of your code.

      Having used Dreamweaver (and few other visual editors) in the past, I doubt its ability to create a working site that I could not create by hand. Sure it speeds a lot of things up a lot, but so does the HTML tag templates built into BBEdit

      While Dreamweaver does offer a window for editing source directly, I would never call it adequate. Just because you can edit text does not mean its a substitute for a full blown text editor. (Does anyone know if Dreamweaver can use an external editor? I don't remember.)
      • (Does anyone know if Dreamweaver can use an external editor? I don't remember.)

        Yes. And it's called BBEdit. ;-) .

      • I'm a Mac user at home, but at work its Windows. At least in the Windows version of Dreamweaver, DW checks to see if the file has been touched outside of Dreamweaver. There isn't integration with an external editor, but it works on the assumption you may need one. I'll have a file open in Dreamweaver and the same file open in emacs or jedit at the same time. I'll make a change to it in emacs/jedit. When I click on DW, it noticed its been edited outside of DW, and asks if I should reload. It'd be nicer

      • (Does anyone know if Dreamweaver can use an external editor? I don't remember.)

        Yes, in earlier versions: this fun Mac text editor called BBEdit.

        I haven't used a recent version of Dreamweaver on the Mac, so I don't know if it still can.

    • Re:BBedit going out with a bang? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Arkham ( 10779 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @10:18AM (#6048145)
      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.

    • Re:BBedit going out with a bang? (Score:4, Informative)

      by self assembled struc ( 62483 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @11:35AM (#6048907) Homepage
      Nor, do I think you work on a LOT of websites. I'm the senior web developer for the also-ran search engine, and without BBEdit and OS X, i'd scream.

      BBEdit lets you do GREP-based search and replace across multiple open files, files in a directory, has code clean up options and the such.

      I write all of my code in BBEdit, JS, CSS,XHTML, PHP, whatever...layers, multiple frames..whatever. It's still the best text editor i've ever used, bar none

    • Web-design has evolved into its own art form. More and more webpages are popping up with elaborate layering schemes and graphical widgets. Toss in some php scripts and you've created a beautiful mess that one could never code by hand.

      Not to be insulting, but the only people I know who don't code by hand are hacks who don't have to or aren't able to create complex, long-term maintainable sites.

      Doing it with the GUI just doesn't scale, once you get past the Photoshop/Imageready stage.

      • Damn straight. Any web designer/developer worth their salt would never use anything other than a text editor (and pen and paper, of course) to create the sites they work on. It's the only way you can create clean code without all those mm_foo function names and other proprietary crap that doesn't validate.
    • i only code in xhtml and css - dreamweaver doesn't display this for shit. and it runs slower.
    • Never code by hand? I regularly do code complex websites using php and such by hand. Tried Dreamweaver but I couldn't stand it. Kind of a personal preference thing i think.
    • BBEdit is far from dead; it's a model for gui text editors across platforms.

      The beautiful thing about BBEdit is that it's really a swiss army knife for text. It's good for a lot more than authoring code (which it does very well, with colored syntax for most languages).

      The built-in grep engine alone saves me dozens of hours of work/year, all programs should be using it. Even if i'm laying out pages in Quark, chances are i'll run text through BBEdit for some cleanup.

      For remote editing on my websites, i can
    • If you understand the layers that are involved then there is no reason why you can't code by hand. In fact, I would say it is the only way to develope a large site. Kiddy tools like Dreamweaver hide way to much from you. You have to get down to the code if you want to optimize and/or simplify the code. Think of it this way, Manual or automatic transmition. Manual is the best way to date to comunicate to the car what you plan to do (I see a hill, better change gears). I do all my asp and java developmen
  • What's in BBEdit that isn't in, say, Vim? I've only used Lite, and wasn't impressed -- is the expensive version any better?

    • Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jcbphi ( 235355 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @10:08AM (#6048048) Homepage
      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:Question (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Phroggy ( 441 ) * <slashdot3@NospaM.phroggy.com> on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @04:46PM (#6051799) Homepage
        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?
    • What's in BBEdit that isn't in, say, Vim? I've only used Lite, and wasn't impressed -- is the expensive version any better?

      You can download the 30-day demo, and find out for yourself.

  • Leap Year (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Ann Coulter ( 614889 )
    celebrates 3650 days of saving your ass

    Shouldn't it be 3652 days since there were two leap years between 1993 and 2003?
  • For Windows users, I recommend EMEditor (Google it) as an excellent product. It has macros, a customizable toolbar, a nice standard windows interface, source highlighting for many languages (configurable, too - add your own languages if you want). It auto-indents after brackets if you want, you can shift tab out entire blocks of text. It's not free like VIM, but it behaves much more like a "normal" text editor. They have a demo, too (not functionally limited, either). It's also free for students.

  • Comes with Chocolat (Score:3, Interesting)

    by WatertonMan ( 550706 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @03:19PM (#6051095)
    Hey, not only did it come in the mail today, but it came with Chocolat with some exclusive chocolat from this Berkeley company. Great! Plus I didn't have to pay for it! (The folks at BBEdit sent it to me for free since we'd submitted some code *way* back)

  • it is pretty versatile (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If their slogan is "XXXX days of saving your ass"...well, i gotta admit, they saved mine.

    BBEdit is a good hex editor. I really haven't used any other hex editor for the Mac, but, I really don't feel that I need to.

    I was having problems with a a corrupt file. Flash (.FLA). The only advice I could ever get about how to recover it was to choose Save As... in Flash to create a "Clean Copy". Of course, it didn't work (thank you for your sagicity, Macromedia. thanks you for your support)
    But, I managed to actual
  • allow me to say bbedit rules. that being said ... what's up with BB? just a few months ago, they were offering a version of bbedit for $250k, but that'd include ungodly support, feature requests, etc etc. here [slashdot.org]'s the /. story. between that and this one ... well, that marketing defintely caught my attention.
  • Does anyone remember Vantage? It was a desk accessory. Remember them, installed with the Font/DA Mover? Now I'm really dating myself. But it was a damned nice text editor that could strip/add prefixes and suffixes, remove line breaks, wrap and unwrap, entab and detab, and it was also programmable to some degree so you could process a batch of files through various filters, or add a script to one of the menus, which were on each file window, since DAs didn't have regular menus. Not only that, but it allowed

  • More than 10 years (Score:3, Informative)

    by h3 ( 27424 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @09:54PM (#6053745) Homepage Journal
    Looking at the timeline, the 10 years refers to the commercial releases of BBEdit, which began in 1993 at v2.5x.

    I recall using it for a programming class in college ca. '89-'90, so it's been already a bit longer than that. Probably longer than some slashdotters have been around :p.

    I also remember reading the README that came with the original freeware BBEdit, where Rich proclaimed that BBEdit will always and forever be FREE (as in beer).

    For whatever that's worth.

    -h3
  • I use BBEdit for EVERYTHING. And I do mean EVERYTHING. I would write HTML with it. My Java, Javascript, C, Perl, and Bash shell scripting/programming was done with BBEdit. I'd edit massive numbers of MRTG and Nagios configuration files with it. BBEdit was my favorite tool for processing a list of spammers' domain names and netblocks for inclusive in my Sendmail access DB. It's Find and Replace feature set is riveled only by vi (and who in their right minds would want to use that?!). How many tools do

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