Ohh, BBEdit. I've long since moved on from the Mac platform, but I still have really fond memories of it and wish more text editors could match it (SublimeText is pretty good too).
I remember when BBEdit came out. It was revolutionary at the time. It was a fun challenge to find "large" files to test it on, and for a while nobody was sure how it did the magic it did.
It shipped with a really clean UI and it gave me my introduction to regular expressions. Its "light" theme is still so good that I occasionally try to clone it into environments (unsuccessfully).
When Mac development shifted from the THINK ecosystem over towards Metrowerks, CodeWarrior's IDE was such a pig that you'd figure out how to do the editing in BBEdit and the debugging and compiling in MWCW.
BBEdit also shipped with a rare (again, at the time) ability to open and juggle loooooots of windows, and with a little bit of Applescript we'd try to open an entire directory of files just to see if we could make it faceplant. It almost never did.
I have a huge amount of respect for Rich and having stuck to doing one thing and one thing well for so long. (Well, kinda. TextWrangler was okay, and MailSmith was pretty good but got sold.)
My memory of CodeWarrior is a bit different. It didn't seem like a pig, but BBEdit just worked better for editing files. BBEdit had better search/replace, shortcuts for navigating text, everything was just better in BBEdit.
FTA: "We’ve always had the utmost respect for the user. Every internal decision about look and function answers the questions 'What does the customer need?' and 'How can we help them be more productive?' (Not 'How can we give them what they’re asking for?' because that isn’t the right question to answer.)"
I experienced this first hand when asking Rich to restore the "hard wrap to window width" feature in TextWrangler[1] (it had also been removed from BBEdit).
He quickly and kindly replied that while "We don't have any plans to restore the 'Window Width' option for hard wrapping" I could "describe how this would be useful to you" for him to "give it some thought".
I simply downgraded to restore the desired functionality, as I did not want to waste the author's time arguing over the utility of a feature that had been included for ages.
Since then, I've purchased BBEdit licenses, but use other editors when I need to hard wrap text to window width.
Heh. I just looked up an exchange I had with Bare Bones support from 2001 (!) about the hard-wrap-as-you-type feature. This was an early BBE feature that was removed when they added soft wrapping.
I tried to argue for this feature but was politely refused. The argument was: "It is not so much that the code can not co-exist as that the combination of user experiences causes confusion. The two states (hard wrap while typing) and soft wrapping have the same visual result and would tend to cause considerable confusion. Because of this we removed the first when we added the second."
It's 22 years later and the feature has not been restored. I wonder how many times its been refused.
If it’s export to pdf I’d think simply being on Mac solves that assuming it has print functionality. Is the issue the print functionality in MacOS can’t handle files as big as BBEdit can making using that sometimes impossible?
Or maybe it is actually a lack of print functionality and you’re remembering export to pdf cause it came up in that conversation?
I would test myself but I don’t have the app installed right now.
Was this intended to be a positive anecdote? It doesn’t sound like one - how is removing a feature users care about and refusing to add it back any evidence of “utmost respect for the user”?
I read this as a positive. Practicing what you preach. Rich asked for a further introduction into the needs behind the users request. The user decided not to pursue that further. Perhaps the feature could have been re-introduced if the client had a very clear user story. We won't know. Is it fair to ask users for stories when you introduce UI/UX regressions. That's debatable. But Rick showed real interest consistent with expectations.
> Since then, I've purchased BBEdit licenses, but use other editors when I need to hard wrap text to window width.
BBEdit is incredibly scriptable and extensible. You could have written a short script in AppleScript, Perl, Ruby, Python, etc. to perform this task without leaving BBEdit.
Hah. VIM has had both soft and hard wrapping since forever and they're visually distinguished by the line numbers and line continuation marks in the gutter. I find it extremely useful, as I don't want to write overlong lines for commits &c, but do want to soft-wrap existing long lines where they are found.
> (Not 'How can we give them what they’re asking for?' because that isn’t the right question to answer.)
We say some very similar variant of this where I currently work, and also at previous places. Personally, I've never been able to understand this in any other way than:
a.) our users are idiots, we developers know much better then those poor souls
b.) our users are idiots, adding a feature without taking away a marginally-similar feature would be so confusing for them, poor souls
And I think it's why BBEdit gets this historical puff piece that reads like an in-flight magazine piece congratulating Madonna on still being able to dance at this late stage of her career.
I used BBEdit 1.0, and probably every version after that -- including the OpenDoc component[1] version!! -- but I finally stopped paying for it after version 13, after realizing I only ever used it for dealing with my Japanese bank's legacy-encoding CSV files. (Which I still do, to be fair, but the free version works for this.)
I don't think BBEdit has maintained legitimate relevance, in terms of writing most kinds of code, or even more complex text-processing workflows (for which it is better-suited relative to coding), and IMHO that's basically because of this attitude of "our users are dumb! we must protect them, poor little lambs!"
For instance, despite having had rectangular selection quite early, when it was rare (20 years ago? memories get hazy...), I don't think they ever made the jump to Sublime-style multiple cursors and discontiguous selections/insertion-points (later made 9 quintillion times more popular by VS Code) -- arguably the most significant advance in text editors since the introduction of multiple windows.
Likewise language servers and basically everything since 2013 or so.
I might be wrong, though; I look at text editors from the writer-of-software perspective, mainly. TFA references people using BBEdit to write English, and as that endeavor has gotten more complicated ("just write it in Markdown" somebody once said to my father, and he threw a spiny squash at their head) maybe BBEdit's niche has shifted. I don't think it is relevant today as a source code editor, but maybe as a blog post editor, or applied statistics prompt editor, etc?
> We've always had the utmost respect for the user. Every internal decision about look and function answers the auestions "What does the customer need?" and "How can we help them be more productive?" (Not "How can we give them what they're asking for?" because that isn't the right question to answer.)
That’s hard to do and I would guess that their ability to distinguish between what users ask for and what they need is a big part of the software’s longevity.
> That’s hard to do and I would guess that their ability to distinguish between what users ask for and what they need is a big part of the software’s longevity.
True, but it's also necessary. As Henry Ford (supposedly) famously said "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
I've always thought this anecdote about Henry Ford is misleading, if not utterly false. In most cases giving people what you think is best for them and not what they ask for, results in a completely failure. Only a small percentage of cases actually leads to a groundbreaking new technology. But our memory is biased: we only tell success stories and forget the failures...
That's usually the (supposed) quote that is brought up when somebody questions this "don't give the user what they want, figure out what they need" notion.
And it sounds great, and makes you laugh the first time you hear it (but yawn the next 9,999 times...)
But think it through: how many customers really would have actually said that?
Wow, you guessed correctly! It was indeed, four guys, out of all the customers Ford had. If he had asked them, which he said he didn't.
But how many of those four would have really said that if they didn't happen to be drunk?
Wow, correct again! Indeed, zero.
So in fact this whole pithy little quote -- regardless of whether he said it or not -- is just shorthand for HAW HAW USERS DUM AS SHIT BRO LMAO
BareBones has had several good programs to go along with BBEdit.
Yojimbo is a kind of catch-all database where you can cram stuff and organize it. Kind of like a Pinterest for all kinds of things, not just images. With the family pack, everybody can have access to the same lump-o-stuff.
Way back in the day, they had Mailsmith, which was, more or less, a POP mail client with BBEdit crammed in. (This was back when pretty much all email was text and not HTML.) If you used email a lot, and needed to do clever things with it, it was fantastic. It never made the jump to IMAP AFAIK, so it kind of died out. I really liked it, but in today's world where a lot of email doesn't come multipart MIME, just HTML, it would be less useful.
But BBEdit is just great. Much like emacs, once you get immersed into the ecosystem, you find leaving it difficult. You end up with a collection of snippets and widgets and scripts and bits and bobs that become your workflow. And you can script all of it as well. It continues to chug along with ridiculously large files, even back when you might work on files bigger than the amount of RAM in your machine.
I'll remain a Mac user for as long as BBEdit works on it. While I can use other editors, if I have the choice I'll work in BBEdit.
I recently emailed a guy that, if you sent him a text-only email (as I normally do), it would go into his spam folder or get vanished. I had to turn on HTML email to send something to him.
They used some version of Outlook. Don't know if it was in-house or the Microsoft hosted service or what. Plus whatever gimcrack spam filters they might use in house. I've seen some nonsense on the Internet, but this was a first for me. Absolutely bonkers.
I really wish they or someone would turn Yojimbo into a scientific papers PDF organizer/reader, or at least have some support for this. Papers was good but got bloated and the standalone is not supported anymore
I like Yojimbo on Mac, but for the life of me I can't figure out why their iPad app is read only still. I understood it when it first came out, but they added all kinds of features on the Mac version, such as iCloud sync, but the iPad app still only syncs via local network only, and it can't edit anything, and doesn't take advantage of things like web views.
If you're looking for something like Yojimbo with near feature parity on macOS and iPadOS, take a look at DEVONThink Pro. I use it with a ScanSnap and ExactScan as my digital filing cabinet.
I haven't used BBEdit regularly since I discovered Vim (and now Neovim) 10+ years ago, allowing my license to lapse. But I couldn't resist the 30th anniversary sale to purchase the latest version for $30.
The UI hasn't changed much, which is both good and not so good.
Neovim will continue to be my daily driver but I'm glad to support a small, local (to where I live) developer who's been making great Mac software for a long time.
> BBEdit is like an insurance policy just in case…
I'm curious to understand how proprietary software can act as an insurance policy against open source software. I can understand how the reverse would be true.
I think he means insurance in the sense that if he wants to use it (for whatever reason) it's there.
But BBEdit, while proprietary software, doesn't make proprietary files. They're just text files. So if BareBones went insane and turned BBEdit into a front-end for TikTok, your files will still just be text files. Even BBEdit's "Project" file is just a text file.
It think OP means insurance in that they know how to use it well and can "fall back" to it if their current choice fails to meet their needs. I do not think they meant insurance as in failsafe/archival purposes/the company shutting down.
BBEdit was my first text editor ~15 years ago! Back when I was really obsessive over the small stuff because I wanted to be like the cool kids. I then got into Text Wrangler, vim, emacs, nvim, etc. over the years. I was really into customizing my environment.
Now I just use IntelliJ and VSCode. Don't really have to think about it, plugin system has grown enormously, and I rarely need to spend time futzing with my configs because excellent themes are free and plentiful. Progress!
I use vim and don't futz around with my config. I feel like this is a perpetual myth that vim or emacs requires endless tinkering. I maybe touch it once a year, and I still have:
- LSP support - code actions, hover, gotos, linting.
- Fuzzy finding with previews (with syntax highlighting thanks to bat)
- Integrated Git
- Integrated Terminal
- Integrated Debugger
It's a real shame that IntelliJ and VSCode users scare beginners off from trying out all the amazing editors like Vim, Barebones, Nova, etc. with this FUD that they won't get anything done. I've seen people swap between editors like SOs in high school and I've been able to consistently stick with Vim my entire career, so maybe the FOTM editor crowd are really not seeing the gains in productivity they believe they are getting by always picking the "out of the box" editor.
I'm not a huge fan of app stores in general, but I have to give Apple credit for these articles they do. Never too long, high quality and interesting ones like this come along semi-regularly especially the design-centric ones. I've actually found a few good apps through these over the years, partly because of design showcases that looked cool and partly because the developer seemed like a nice person and I wanted to check their app out.
I'm sure Apple have the utmost respect for their users, and the internal decisions that led to this design choice answered the questions "what does the customer need?" and "how can we help them be more productive?"
Say what you want about BBEdit no longer being useful in the modern era, but whenever I have to work with a multi-megabyte file that my IDE chokes on, BBEdit can open it no problem.
The killer feature of Sublime for me is cross platform. I am stuck in Windows at work, and I have a Mac at home. I don’t need to have to think where I am each time I edit text.
Readit News
I remember when BBEdit came out. It was revolutionary at the time. It was a fun challenge to find "large" files to test it on, and for a while nobody was sure how it did the magic it did.
It shipped with a really clean UI and it gave me my introduction to regular expressions. Its "light" theme is still so good that I occasionally try to clone it into environments (unsuccessfully).
When Mac development shifted from the THINK ecosystem over towards Metrowerks, CodeWarrior's IDE was such a pig that you'd figure out how to do the editing in BBEdit and the debugging and compiling in MWCW.
BBEdit also shipped with a rare (again, at the time) ability to open and juggle loooooots of windows, and with a little bit of Applescript we'd try to open an entire directory of files just to see if we could make it faceplant. It almost never did.
I have a huge amount of respect for Rich and having stuck to doing one thing and one thing well for so long. (Well, kinda. TextWrangler was okay, and MailSmith was pretty good but got sold.)
Deleted Comment
I experienced this first hand when asking Rich to restore the "hard wrap to window width" feature in TextWrangler[1] (it had also been removed from BBEdit).
He quickly and kindly replied that while "We don't have any plans to restore the 'Window Width' option for hard wrapping" I could "describe how this would be useful to you" for him to "give it some thought".
I simply downgraded to restore the desired functionality, as I did not want to waste the author's time arguing over the utility of a feature that had been included for ages.
Since then, I've purchased BBEdit licenses, but use other editors when I need to hard wrap text to window width.
[1] https://tinyapps.org/blog/201807150700_hard_wrap_window_widt...
I tried to argue for this feature but was politely refused. The argument was: "It is not so much that the code can not co-exist as that the combination of user experiences causes confusion. The two states (hard wrap while typing) and soft wrapping have the same visual result and would tend to cause considerable confusion. Because of this we removed the first when we added the second."
It's 22 years later and the feature has not been restored. I wonder how many times its been refused.
1. I want to change the highlight colour. It is too dim to recognize.
People in the forum asked: hey I don't want hidden settings. Can you make the highlight colour adjustable?
A: No. We won't do it. [1]
[1] : https://groups.google.com/g/bbedit/c/yz_StJa9HVA
2. I forgot if it is the print function or what, it just don't have despite in the year of 2022. Oh wait maybe that is the function "export to pdf".
People in the forum asked: Where can I do that thing?
A: We don't know either. Go find other editor if you want it.
Or maybe it is actually a lack of print functionality and you’re remembering export to pdf cause it came up in that conversation?
I would test myself but I don’t have the app installed right now.
BBEdit is incredibly scriptable and extensible. You could have written a short script in AppleScript, Perl, Ruby, Python, etc. to perform this task without leaving BBEdit.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
We say some very similar variant of this where I currently work, and also at previous places. Personally, I've never been able to understand this in any other way than:
a.) our users are idiots, we developers know much better then those poor souls
b.) our users are idiots, adding a feature without taking away a marginally-similar feature would be so confusing for them, poor souls
And I think it's why BBEdit gets this historical puff piece that reads like an in-flight magazine piece congratulating Madonna on still being able to dance at this late stage of her career.
I used BBEdit 1.0, and probably every version after that -- including the OpenDoc component[1] version!! -- but I finally stopped paying for it after version 13, after realizing I only ever used it for dealing with my Japanese bank's legacy-encoding CSV files. (Which I still do, to be fair, but the free version works for this.)
I don't think BBEdit has maintained legitimate relevance, in terms of writing most kinds of code, or even more complex text-processing workflows (for which it is better-suited relative to coding), and IMHO that's basically because of this attitude of "our users are dumb! we must protect them, poor little lambs!"
For instance, despite having had rectangular selection quite early, when it was rare (20 years ago? memories get hazy...), I don't think they ever made the jump to Sublime-style multiple cursors and discontiguous selections/insertion-points (later made 9 quintillion times more popular by VS Code) -- arguably the most significant advance in text editors since the introduction of multiple windows.
Likewise language servers and basically everything since 2013 or so.
I might be wrong, though; I look at text editors from the writer-of-software perspective, mainly. TFA references people using BBEdit to write English, and as that endeavor has gotten more complicated ("just write it in Markdown" somebody once said to my father, and he threw a spiny squash at their head) maybe BBEdit's niche has shifted. I don't think it is relevant today as a source code editor, but maybe as a blog post editor, or applied statistics prompt editor, etc?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
That’s hard to do and I would guess that their ability to distinguish between what users ask for and what they need is a big part of the software’s longevity.
True, but it's also necessary. As Henry Ford (supposedly) famously said "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
And it sounds great, and makes you laugh the first time you hear it (but yawn the next 9,999 times...)
But think it through: how many customers really would have actually said that?
Wow, you guessed correctly! It was indeed, four guys, out of all the customers Ford had. If he had asked them, which he said he didn't.
But how many of those four would have really said that if they didn't happen to be drunk?
Wow, correct again! Indeed, zero.
So in fact this whole pithy little quote -- regardless of whether he said it or not -- is just shorthand for HAW HAW USERS DUM AS SHIT BRO LMAO
Yojimbo is a kind of catch-all database where you can cram stuff and organize it. Kind of like a Pinterest for all kinds of things, not just images. With the family pack, everybody can have access to the same lump-o-stuff.
Way back in the day, they had Mailsmith, which was, more or less, a POP mail client with BBEdit crammed in. (This was back when pretty much all email was text and not HTML.) If you used email a lot, and needed to do clever things with it, it was fantastic. It never made the jump to IMAP AFAIK, so it kind of died out. I really liked it, but in today's world where a lot of email doesn't come multipart MIME, just HTML, it would be less useful.
But BBEdit is just great. Much like emacs, once you get immersed into the ecosystem, you find leaving it difficult. You end up with a collection of snippets and widgets and scripts and bits and bobs that become your workflow. And you can script all of it as well. It continues to chug along with ridiculously large files, even back when you might work on files bigger than the amount of RAM in your machine.
I'll remain a Mac user for as long as BBEdit works on it. While I can use other editors, if I have the choice I'll work in BBEdit.
I find that ignoring mail which lacks a text/plain part makes for a pretty decent spam filter.
They used some version of Outlook. Don't know if it was in-house or the Microsoft hosted service or what. Plus whatever gimcrack spam filters they might use in house. I've seen some nonsense on the Internet, but this was a first for me. Absolutely bonkers.
Weirdly behind feature set still
The UI hasn't changed much, which is both good and not so good.
Neovim will continue to be my daily driver but I'm glad to support a small, local (to where I live) developer who's been making great Mac software for a long time.
BBEdit is like an insurance policy just in case…
I'm curious to understand how proprietary software can act as an insurance policy against open source software. I can understand how the reverse would be true.
But BBEdit, while proprietary software, doesn't make proprietary files. They're just text files. So if BareBones went insane and turned BBEdit into a front-end for TikTok, your files will still just be text files. Even BBEdit's "Project" file is just a text file.
Now I just use IntelliJ and VSCode. Don't really have to think about it, plugin system has grown enormously, and I rarely need to spend time futzing with my configs because excellent themes are free and plentiful. Progress!
- LSP support - code actions, hover, gotos, linting.
- Fuzzy finding with previews (with syntax highlighting thanks to bat)
- Integrated Git
- Integrated Terminal
- Integrated Debugger
It's a real shame that IntelliJ and VSCode users scare beginners off from trying out all the amazing editors like Vim, Barebones, Nova, etc. with this FUD that they won't get anything done. I've seen people swap between editors like SOs in high school and I've been able to consistently stick with Vim my entire career, so maybe the FOTM editor crowd are really not seeing the gains in productivity they believe they are getting by always picking the "out of the box" editor.
From my experience SublimeText handles large files fine, but I never really tried to open multi-gigabyte size files.
I love SublimeText, it’s my favorite text editor and also multiplatform, so I have the same experience and tools on macOS, Windows & Linux.