[HN Gopher] BBEdit 14
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       BBEdit 14
        
       Author : chmaynard
       Score  : 215 points
       Date   : 2021-07-21 13:00 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.barebones.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.barebones.com)
        
       | ilovecaching wrote:
       | I use BBEdit and love the editor (esp. love the new LSP support),
       | but have hated the name and the icon for a long time. I have all
       | these beautiful macOS icons, and then there's BBedit with it's
       | weird acronym name and encyclopedia looking icon. Maybe it's time
       | for a rebranding for the next generation!
       | 
       | But seriously, BBEdit IMO beats out VSCode for speed and
       | stability by a mile if you're a macOS user. And you're supporting
       | a much smaller company than Microsoft.
        
         | eludwig wrote:
         | >>But seriously, BBEdit IMO beats out VSCode for speed and
         | stability by a mile if you're a macOS user
         | 
         | I've been using BBEdit since the first release and I would
         | never trade it for VSCode. They are totally different beasts to
         | me. VSCode has been ridiculously stable for me and, as far as I
         | can recall, has never crashed or lost a single line of source
         | code. VSCode's speed has never been an issue, as it is ALWAYS
         | open all the time, lol. I restart to update it and that is
         | that.
         | 
         | On the other hand, BBEdit is always open as well, performing
         | totally different tasks. These days, I use it mainly as a
         | persistent note taker and text munger. I will definitely be
         | looking to test the new "Notes Window" functionality!
         | 
         | Both great tools, open 24x7 on my dev mac.
        
         | tumultco wrote:
         | I made a revised icon that imho fits in better with the Big
         | Sur's look and works at Dock sizes:
         | 
         | https://twitter.com/jmfd/status/1417595485653635073
        
         | jtbayly wrote:
         | The icon is definitely updated in 14.
        
           | spiderice wrote:
           | It is, but it is still really ugly and feels very out of
           | place on a Mac.
           | 
           | edit: typo
        
             | tablespoon wrote:
             | > It is, but it is stilly really ugly and feels very out of
             | place on a Mac.
             | 
             | How? I just download it, an the icon looks totally fine to
             | me.
             | 
             | Also, BBEdit is _really_ old. Having it change its name to
             | suit modern fashions is about as desirable as having Emacs
             | do the same.
        
               | spiderice wrote:
               | I agree, I'm not suggesting a name change at all. That
               | would be bad. And obviously the idea of the icon being
               | ugly is completely objective, but I just don't like it.
               | Bad colors. Bad shapes. Idk. It looks old, probably
               | because it is. But plenty of old companies have
               | modernized their logos in a pleasant way.
        
               | tablespoon wrote:
               | > I agree, I'm not suggesting a name change at all.
               | 
               | I was kinda responding to an ancestor comment with that
               | statement.
               | 
               | > Bad colors. Bad shapes. Idk. It looks old, probably
               | because it is. But plenty of old companies have
               | modernized their logos in a pleasant way.
               | 
               | Modernization is often a regression. Looking at the icons
               | in my apps folder, there are _way_ too many seemingly
               | standard-size circles differentiated by a little color or
               | a less-prominent icon, and most of the rest are a
               | standard-size squares with similar characteristics. It 's
               | like if the alphabet was all O's, but with different
               | colors and small diacritics. IMHO, "modern" UIs tend far
               | too much towards indistinguishably in order to achieve a
               | "unified" look, which looks good in a quick demo but is
               | detrimental to daily use.
               | 
               | However, the ultimate mistake is Apple's, for creating a
               | text-free dock that makes the icons do too much work. And
               | of course, Apple's mistakes must be copied by everyone
               | else, because they're so good at marketing (I'm looking
               | at you, Microsoft).
        
         | bonaldi wrote:
         | you can make it look like TextWrangler too if that helps
        
         | plodman wrote:
         | https://macosicons.com/
         | 
         | Unfortunately it doesn't stick if there's an update but it
         | solves the problem temporarily.
        
           | wlesieutre wrote:
           | Replacicon is $3 well spent if you want custom icons to stick
           | between updates
           | 
           | https://replacicon.app/
        
       | Account123481-x wrote:
       | I can't believe this thing still has legs.
        
       | _venkatasg wrote:
       | LSP is game-changing. I had made a bunch of clippings to work
       | with for TeX and Python, and this obviates the need for most of
       | those :)
        
       | talentedcoin wrote:
       | Can someone here explain to me the appeal of BBEdit? I've tried
       | using it several times but it never clicked with me. (I'm an
       | Emacs user.)
        
         | charklet wrote:
         | I use it as my main visual plain text editor, but use vi on the
         | CLI and JetBrains stuff for coding. The use cases I like it
         | for:
         | 
         | - copy/paste ANYTHING, every tried to copy something from the
         | browser and paste it to the CLI and nothing happens? Anytime I
         | have difficulty pasting text, I paste into BBEdit first and
         | then copy it again to paste into its destination. BBEdit eats
         | any kind of text, it's amazing.
         | 
         | - Large files, I've found nothing is faster for opening and
         | editing large file >1G
         | 
         | - Note taking - Has a few advantages over other options (Bear,
         | Notes, Evernote) here that I don't miss the rich text features
         | of those others. 1) No automatic autocorrect for spelling but
         | the manual autocorrect is still there which means I can write
         | tech jargon without getting frustrated 2) Autosave without
         | having to think of a title or folder 3) Immediate start up
         | time, no waiting for the doc to load even if I have >100 open
         | docs
         | 
         | - batch text processing - if I need to do find/replace I tend
         | to go with BBEdit over CLI, I can build up the regex pattern
         | and have undo capability. Use it a lot for making SQL
         | statements from lists of ids and the like.
        
         | neurobashing wrote:
         | A few other points I didn't see anyone mention:
         | 
         | Extensive Applescript support. I'm going to go out on a limb
         | here and assume most HN readers are not fans, and probably
         | those who know any of it hate it. But, BBEdit has great
         | documentation and an extremely solid and comprehensive
         | implementation. It's one of the only Mac apps I truly feel I
         | can do anything at all with in AS.
         | 
         | Shell worksheets. Something of a Mac-only tool, I think. Emacs
         | users won't be impressed, but this feature isn't common on
         | other Mac editors, and I think both camps can agree "why the
         | hell NOT?". Having your shell environment be your text editor
         | is great!
        
         | deltarholamda wrote:
         | I've been using BBEdit since v4.0. One thing that sticks out
         | for me was, way back in System 7 days, I opened up a huge (for
         | the time) CSV text file to do some search/replace. I don't
         | remember the size, but it was larger than available RAM on the
         | machine, so maybe 20MB. It opened, and I was able to work on
         | it.
         | 
         | Recently I had to open a 1GB text file in BBEdit to also do a
         | search/replace. (Not something I could use the command line
         | easily for, because I had to make executive decisions as to
         | keep or replace what I found.) Worked flawlessly.
         | 
         | The application is ridiculously solid. Like emacs, it's very
         | customizable. I have several wonko scripts written in PHP that
         | I can use to munge data, but you can also use Applescript, or
         | Perl, or whatever. Code snippets are great.
         | 
         | But the real appeal is, again, similar to emacs: once you get
         | into the workflow and set your editor up the way you like,
         | including keyboard shortcuts, layout, etc., you can become
         | insanely productive. It becomes a personalized environment to
         | such an extent that the thought of moving out is terrifying.
         | 
         | (Years ago, Bare Bones had a mail client called Mailsmith. It
         | BBEdit-ized your mail client. I loved it, but email moved on
         | and they didn't keep it up. I still miss it.)
        
           | abzug wrote:
           | Are your scripts available somewhere? I would love to take a
           | look at those. Can other languages be used instead of PHP?
        
         | relaxatorium wrote:
         | In my own experience, it's a solid but outdatedly old-school
         | code editor, but it shines spectacularly in text processing.
         | 
         | I always tend to use other editors as my daily driver
         | (TextMate, Atom, VSCode, whatever the new flavor is), but I
         | always keep BBEDit around and updated for this reason.
         | Eventually I am going to need to open an enormous CSV or
         | logfile and do things to it and BBEdit is there for me. It
         | happily opens the thing where other apps scream and choke and
         | die, and it has great text processing tools to do things with
         | that data.
         | 
         | Another thing that's not my reason for liking it but is very
         | real is it's incredible Macness. Unsurprisingly given its 30+
         | year history on the platform, it's an extremely well behaved
         | Mac application that adheres very cleanly to Mac user
         | expectations of behavior. Doesn't matter that much to me
         | personally, but you'll find a lot of the old-school "fondly
         | reminiscing about Mac SE/30s" types really appreciate that it
         | just feels more like a Mac application than probably even a lot
         | of the built in MacOS applications these days.
        
         | fay59 wrote:
         | It's in a very precise midpoint between Notepad and an IDE that
         | preciously few other text editors stand in.
        
         | dhruvbhatia wrote:
         | My story is rather dated and admittedly only one data point,
         | but when I was in my early teens (early 2000s), WYSIWYG editors
         | like Frontpage and Dreamweaver were the tools I used to self-
         | learn the basics of web dev. The issue though was that those
         | editors were rather bloated and ran very poorly on the machine
         | my mother had bought me, so it became increasingly favourable
         | to seek something lighter weight and non-WYSIWYG as I learnt
         | more about the languages of the web and grew more competent.
         | stumbled upon BBEdit and used it to a) grow my knowledge of the
         | languages and; b) be able to build things in a more productive
         | manner without the computer grinding to a halt. I think perhaps
         | learning to code through WYSIWYG and then migrating to text
         | editors is a common pathway?
        
           | edoceo wrote:
           | Anecdata: I didn't learn web stuff via WYSIWIG (but I did VB6
           | that way, a bit). My first web-app was built with ASP in
           | notepad and smashing that refresh button. I still don't like
           | the graphic, I'm coding it (like a caveman?)
        
           | Lammy wrote:
           | This was exactly my path to loving BBEdit since it let me be
           | a productive PHP dev (insert joke here) on the 5+ year old
           | PowerMac 7300 I was able to afford at the time with my own
           | money as a young teenager. I remember the HTML capabilities
           | they added around version 5/6 being a really huge deal for a
           | lot of people: http://www.atpm.com/6.10/bbedit.shtml
           | 
           | I don't use a Mac daily any more, but I still can't use
           | anything except ProFont in my editors after growing up
           | spending so many hours staring at bitmap Monaco 9 in BBEdit:
           | https://tobiasjung.name/profont/
        
       | alberth wrote:
       | You gotta love how on their website they have the "Made with
       | BBEdit" icon in the footer.
       | 
       | https://www.barebones.com/images/BuiltWithBBEdit.jpg
       | 
       | Brings back memories of when all websites did this and included
       | Netscape/IE/etc icon banners.
        
         | mattl wrote:
         | Powered by WebObjects is my favorite
        
       | winrid wrote:
       | Curious, that's a pretty valuable domain name nowadays, right?
        
       | mistrial9 wrote:
       | how can one author say "I have spent more than a thousand
       | productive hours using your product" ?
        
         | Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
         | It's been around since 1992, even a very casual user could have
         | easily racked up more than a thousand hours.
         | 
         | Me, I only have a few hundred hours, but they were some of the
         | most formative hours of my career.
        
         | meetups323 wrote:
         | That's just half a year of full time use in a standard day job.
         | An editor could additionally be used outside of work for taking
         | notes or working on side projects.
         | 
         | I've probably used VS Code over 5000 hours in my life. (Halfway
         | to becoming an expert!)
        
       | racl101 wrote:
       | Great, solid, reliable editor. Great documentation.
       | 
       | And don't sleep on the diff tool bbdiff. For text diffing it's
       | pretty fucking good.
        
         | scelerat wrote:
         | This is prominent among many reasons why I've kept BBEdit
         | installed on all my Macs since the mid-'90s, even after most of
         | my development workflow shifted to zsh-nvim-tmux
        
       | jmull wrote:
       | I should probably switch back to BBEdit for my daily editor. It's
       | the editor I reach for when I hit one of the cases that chokes my
       | other editors.
       | 
       | I guess it would already be my daily editor except for some gaps.
       | 
       | LSP probably closes one main gap for me. Now that I'm looking I
       | see some other gaps are also closed.
       | 
       | (Though a remaining big gap is that I have to do a lot of work on
       | Windows and some on Linux, and I'd rather not have two different
       | daily editors.)
        
       | ibic wrote:
       | Saw this editor names several times before, but never used it.
       | Out of curiosity, how does it compare to Sublime Text?
        
         | adrusi wrote:
         | I haven't used BBEdit in over a decade, so my sense of its
         | capabilities are surely out of date. I can't compare features,
         | but I can tell an interesting story.
         | 
         | Sublime Text is arguably a spiritual descendant of BBEdit.
         | Sublime Text (starting with version 2) was heavily inspired by
         | TextMate. In fact it used TextMate file formats for
         | colorschemes and snippets, making it relatively easy for
         | TextMate users to migrate to ST2. That was a major reason for
         | ST2's rise to mass popularity -- TextMate was not receiving
         | updates and was MacOS only, and in comes ST2 offering a very
         | similar editing experience, but with cross-platform support and
         | frequent updates.
         | 
         | TextMate, in turn, was heavily inspired by BBEdit. BBEdit at
         | the time was, as its name suggests, fairly bare-bones. It had
         | auto-indent and syntax highlighting and very sophisticated grep
         | capabilities, but not much else in terms of programming
         | support. For a long time, it was THE code editor for mac users
         | who wanted a graphical interface but not an IDE. TextMate rose
         | to popularity by mostly mimicking BBEdit, but offering
         | additional programming features like snippets and shell-script
         | based plugins and more sophisticated syntax highlighting
         | (enabling e.g. correctly highlighting CSS and JS embedded in an
         | HTML file).
         | 
         | With BBEdit 14 now apparently supporting LSP, it looks like it
         | has incorporated a lot more programming support features. It
         | might at this point be a more-or-less mac-native take on
         | Sublime Text.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | setpatchaddress wrote:
           | > TextMate, in turn, was heavily inspired by BBEdit.
           | 
           | This assertion is surprising. They're not all alike in any
           | way that any two Mac-native text editors wouldn't be. Sublime
           | is markedly different only because it dispenses with Mac-
           | native UI conventions (which IHMO makes it unpleasant to use
           | on macOS).
           | 
           | > BBEdit at the time was, as its name suggests, fairly bare-
           | bones. It had auto-indent and syntax highlighting and very
           | sophisticated grep capabilities, but not much else in terms
           | of programming support. For a long time, it was THE code
           | editor for mac users who wanted a graphical interface but not
           | an IDE. TextMate rose to popularity by mostly mimicking
           | BBEdit, but offering additional programming features like
           | snippets and shell-script based plugins and more
           | sophisticated syntax highlighting (enabling e.g. correctly
           | highlighting CSS and JS embedded in an HTML file).
           | 
           | This seems not quite accurate.
           | 
           | My recollection is that BBEdit was just another Mac plaintext
           | editor app -- solid, but stodgy -- until the Web arrived, and
           | someone built a suite of HTML editing commands for it. That's
           | when it took off. It was the plaintext editor everyone used
           | for HTML until TextMate came along.
        
             | adrusi wrote:
             | My experience with BBEdit was circa 2008, just as I was
             | first learning to code. It's much older than that, yes.
             | 
             | Idk, maybe TextMate wasn't terribly similar to BBEdit, but
             | at the time the landscape of non-IDE graphical editors was
             | fairly limited. I'm only aware of BBEdit and TextMate on
             | Mac, Notepad++ on Windows, and Gedit and Kate on Linux
             | (there were also the vaguely graphical ports of emacs and
             | vim on all platforms, but I won't count those). So I see
             | TextMate as, at the very least, being part of a genre of
             | text editor defined by BBEdit.
        
         | LukeBMM wrote:
         | With the caveat that I've relatively little experience with ST,
         | they're in the same ballpark and probably roughly equivalent.
         | BBEdit is probably dated in some ways and mac-only, but
         | _possibly_ even more stable and quicker than Sublime Text.
        
           | artiszt wrote:
           | coding can be slightly more comfortabale with ST depending on
           | its plugins, for instance Julia is a treat given that VS Code
           | can't be silenced to ST-standards [code-sensing-wise : eg
           | ZenMode under Win may only work full-screen; attempting to
           | switch off all code-sensing won't work, always something
           | 'popping-in' when moving abouts in the editor -- that's how
           | M$ is : either overdoing it and not getting the most basic
           | things right or getting part of it right w/out providing
           | options users desperately ask for : they decide what's best
           | pratise for users and that >feel< is exactly not the sort of
           | feel both, ST and BBEdit transpire]
           | 
           | besides, BBEdit can be incredibly fast when it comes to
           | larger files, sorting and in particular regex-search
           | 
           | [never ever employed any Mac w/out ST, BBEdit, FileBuddy and
           | DiskWarrior; HexEdit and few other free utilities, and one
           | could get work done quite efficiently]
        
         | mrehler wrote:
         | I like the completions of Sublime text a lot better for most
         | tasks. ST's packages are also really powerful and BBEDit isn't
         | extensible in the same ways (though it is through AppleScript
         | and a host of other things).
         | 
         | After the 30-day "trial" is up, the features in its free
         | version are more than worth keeping it installed for. I keep an
         | active license for it in addition to Sublime Text because it's
         | my preferred tool for complicated RegEx things and multi-file
         | search.
        
           | adrusi wrote:
           | After the 30-day trial expires, BBEdit becomes what used to
           | be a separate application from the same developers called
           | TextWrangler. TextWrangler was my first code editor because
           | my dad had it installed on the family iMac for its
           | sophisticated grep capabilities.
        
       | cytzol wrote:
       | Thanks to using BBEdit for a decade now, I get bitterly
       | disappointed whenever I re-open an application and it doesn't
       | restore the windows and state it had when it closed. I've tried
       | switching to both Emacs and Vim, but no amount of configuration
       | nor third-party plugins could get them to work like this
       | effectively. BBEdit works exactly how I want it to work out of
       | the box, and I commend it for that.
        
         | thosakwe wrote:
         | Tim Pope has a plugin for that: https://github.com/tpope/vim-
         | obsession
        
           | bdcravens wrote:
           | That's true so often, you could probably write a bot for that
           | response
        
             | jchook wrote:
             | And half the time it will reference a plugin made by tpope
        
         | bxparks wrote:
         | Be careful what you wish for. I use one application which does
         | not check whether the computer goes from 2 external monitors to
         | the built-in laptop monitor. When I reopen the app on the
         | laptop without the external monitors, all of its windows are
         | drawn completely off the screen. The only way I know how to fix
         | this is to reattach the external monitors, move the windows to
         | the built-in screen, then close the app again.
        
           | banana_giraffe wrote:
           | If you're in Windows, and the off-screen window has focus:
           | Alt-Space -> M -> Any arrow key, and move the mouse.
        
           | pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
           | Shouldn't your window manager give you a way to handle this?
        
             | rsfinn wrote:
             | Shouldn't your window manager just handle this for you, by
             | moving the windows to the builtin display when the external
             | monitor is detached, and moving them back again when it's
             | reattached? (Like my Mac has been doing for I don't know
             | how long?)
        
               | pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
               | I'm not sure what this comment is supposed to add to the
               | discussion. It's the same as those comments that just say
               | "This", except it does it with 40x the number of words,
               | no?
        
         | oritron wrote:
         | I don't know about Vim, but Emacs will do this easily with
         | `persp-mode`. To skip a bit of customization work, get doom-
         | emacs and enable the `workspaces` module, which will save
         | sessions for you by default.
        
       | baggy_trough wrote:
       | Wonder if it can be made to work as nicely as TextMate for
       | ruby/rails work.
        
       | haroldp wrote:
       | > We know that many of our customers create a lot of untitled
       | documents for quick note-taking, and rely on BBEdit's legendary
       | stability and robust crash recovery to protect their work. We've
       | added a new "Notes" feature in BBEdit 14...
       | 
       | Ooh, guilty as charged. I see an "Untitled text 931". It's a list
       | of hostnames. "Untitled text 107" is a Beef & Broccoli recipe.
        
         | 404mm wrote:
         | Lol! Same here.
         | 
         | I want them to have some paid lite mode, that I could purchase
         | and support them. Given my use case I feel like $40 is a bit
         | much but I'd gladly pay $20 for a note taking app.
        
           | lallysingh wrote:
           | Didn't they have TextWrangler for this?
        
             | 404mm wrote:
             | AFAIK, TextWrangler has been discontinued in favor of
             | BBEdit.
             | 
             | On another note, I just found out that the Notes feature is
             | indeed Premium one. Hmmm.
        
             | Jetrel wrote:
             | Yeah - it's worth pointing out that BBEdit itself, can
             | partly be used for free, indefinitely. You're allowed
             | access to a subset of features (which is very similar to
             | what TextWrangler offered), without needing to pay.
             | 
             | I think they reached a point where, even if the codebase
             | had originally been forked from BBEdit, it was just plain
             | dangerous to have a second codebase floating around. I
             | think after they had done the same work (bugfixes, feature
             | additions) twice for quite a while, they just decided
             | "yeah, this was a mistake", and pulled the plug.
        
         | hi_hello wrote:
         | I suddenly feel less alone in the world.
        
         | mikepurvis wrote:
         | Ugh, I do this with Notepad++ too, and I know it's terrible.
         | But it's just so.... automatic. I tell myself that nothing in
         | there is truly critical, but I've also had a few instances of
         | being pretty pleased to be able to "find in all open documents"
         | and recover a bit history of what I was doing, or URLs for some
         | research, or whatever.
        
         | cgufus wrote:
         | I'm reluctant to change over from TextWrangler to BBedit due to
         | fear of loosing those unsaved ,,Untitled text 461" documents.
         | 
         | Does anyone now if BBedit restores TextWrangler's untitled
         | docs?
        
           | crb wrote:
           | I'm fairly certain that half of my 200+ 'untitled text XXX'
           | docs started in TextWrangler, so yes.
        
         | indigodaddy wrote:
         | Notepad++ on Windows has been the standard bearer for this
         | functionality for quite a long time.
        
           | rajandatta wrote:
           | Second this. Other products have it as well but Notepad++ has
           | worked very reliably for me.
        
         | unicornporn wrote:
         | This is the main reason BBEdit has been with me for a decade. I
         | have NEVER lost an unsaved document during that whole time. You
         | quit BBEdit or restart or crash macOS but they're always there
         | when you're back in. Insanely robust.
         | 
         | Is there anything like it on Linux?
        
           | ptomato wrote:
           | Sublime Text has always performed similarly for me
        
             | IncRnd wrote:
             | This Sublime feature has worked for me except for a single
             | time... During one of the interim, 3.x upgrades I lost all
             | of the open but not saved notes files.
        
               | pronoiac wrote:
               | This is the reason I haven't upgraded to Sublime 4 yet.
        
             | snazz wrote:
             | Yep, ST's unsaved default workspace is completely reliable
             | for me--it's survived power outages on my desktop (while I
             | was actively typing) without a hitch.
        
           | jchw wrote:
           | Visual Studio Code has yet to lose workspaces, untitled
           | documents or unsaved changes for me. What is more likely to
           | happen for me is accidentally running Git commands while I
           | had buffers in VSCode with unsaved changes.
        
             | losvedir wrote:
             | I ran into this issue [0] when updating VSCode which caused
             | it to delete the contents of my unsaved/untitled document.
             | 
             | [0]https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/69972
        
               | jchw wrote:
               | OK. So relying on unsaved buffers long-term might still
               | be less safe than in BBEdit, assuming Microsoft hasn't
               | made improvements that prevent this sort of scenario from
               | happening again.
               | 
               | However, it definitely wasn't out of sheer negligence, as
               | they do have tests that try to ensure unsaved data will
               | make it from the last stable version to the current
               | version at all times. Without doing any serious research,
               | all I can say is that it is unfortunate, but if you don't
               | keep unsaved buffers and changes for long periods of time
               | it is at least _fairly_ safe...
               | 
               | https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/test/smoke/
               | src...
        
               | forgotmypw17 wrote:
               | I think this is the sort of thing where trust is lost
               | after just once, never to be regained. Sort of like if
               | someone lies to you, you can never trust them again,
               | because they've done it once.
               | 
               | I think think because software is so new, and the choices
               | are still so slim, many are much more lenient than they
               | would be with a human.
               | 
               | However, as it matures, and there are more choices, we
               | can regain the freedom to exclude any software from our
               | lives after it misbehaves just once, and still have
               | plenty of choices.
               | 
               | Personally, I've given up on Mac, and before that iOS,
               | and before that Windows, and I'm so much happier, because
               | I have invested that time into choices which do not let
               | me down.
               | 
               | I've done the same with dishonest services, too. No more
               | LinkedIn, their emails forever trashbinned.
        
           | pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
           | Vim (cross-platform) supports ability to restore from the
           | "swap" file (by default, AFAIK, but that may very well be a
           | special configuration decision by my distro).
           | 
           | If your system crashes or you lose power while editing
           | foo.src, it will leave the swap file behind, which is eagerly
           | written to disk while editing and only removed when the
           | process shuts down gracefully. When you bring your system
           | back up and try to edit foo.src again, you'll get a message
           | "Swap file ".foo.src.swp" already exists!" and prompt you for
           | whether you'd like to recover it or not. Any unsaved changes
           | you made will be reconstructed from swap, rendering the file
           | in the same state it was before.
           | 
           | Vim also supports a closely related concept "sessions", which
           | you can force with ":mks" and restore with the "-S" flag.
           | This will re-open whatever files you had open at the time, in
           | the same layout, and more.
           | 
           | What would be interesting to see are "super swap files" that
           | are passively created (like ordinary swap files, requiring no
           | intervention) but do everything that session files do and
           | more, like preserving movements, markers, undo history try,
           | etc. -- essentially getting you back to _exactly_ what you
           | had at the time of the interruption.
        
             | Wowfunhappy wrote:
             | What is the performance cost of this sort of thing? I
             | suppose it depends on how often it autosaves, but if it's
             | too infrequent you end up loosing work anyway, and you
             | could imagine it being a problem for files above a certain
             | size.
        
               | kazinator wrote:
               | Probably 25 years ago now, I've trained myself to
               | habitually use "vim -n" for very large files for which
               | recovery isn't required.
        
               | ectopod wrote:
               | The swap file stores edits rather than the whole file. I
               | guess this could be laggy if you were doing global
               | substitutions on a massive log file, say, but I've never
               | had an issue. Vim was written for much slower computers.
        
               | pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
               | What's the performance like? Real fuckin' fast. Ever used
               | Vim? I don't and never have used hardware that would be
               | considered especially beefy.
        
           | winrid wrote:
           | Jetbrain's products have the concept of scratch files, of
           | which I've made thousands over the years.
        
           | spinax wrote:
           | vim: https://github.com/chrisbra/vim-autosave
        
             | pwdisswordfish0 wrote:
             | Any sufficiently large thread about text editors contains a
             | pitch for an ad hoc, bug-ridden, unnecessary plugin that's
             | overkill for achieving some effect which is already
             | possible just using a build of Vim mainline.
             | 
             | :help swap-file
        
           | prionassembly wrote:
           | Sublime Text.
        
           | vbezhenar wrote:
           | IMO every program must work like this. I hate so much those
           | "do you want to save this file" when I close a program. Don't
           | ask me, just save it somewhere and restore when I open the
           | program next time. It's trivial to implement and much easier
           | to use.
        
             | giantrobot wrote:
             | > It's trivial to implement and much easier to use.
             | 
             | ...unless you opened the document from a network share or
             | removable media. Or serialization takes a long time. Or the
             | storage device is slow. Or you don't have write permission
             | in the file's original location and have to pull a
             | potentially large file from somewhere to persist changes to
             | some local position. Or the local storage device is full.
             | 
             | A "always save" mechanism would be best on a system that
             | supported copy-on-write, network-aware links, and automatic
             | file versioning to make writes super cheap. On actual real
             | world systems that currently exist these mechanisms don't
             | really exist or aren't universal so "always save" is
             | fraught with difficult to handle edge cases.
        
         | seanalexander wrote:
         | This is such a great addition to BBEdit's impressive legacy
        
       | tempodox wrote:
       | Instabuy. BBEdit is the one app that has been on every Mac I've
       | ever owned, since the 1990s in fact. No other Mac app I know has
       | existed that long. It has always been rock solid and reasonably
       | priced. I happily buy upgrades when they come out every few
       | years. Thank you, Bare Bones, for staying the course!
        
       | mistersquid wrote:
       | BBEdit has the best regular expression engine second only maybe
       | to Perl.
       | 
       | BBEdit is the bees knees!
        
         | tehwebguy wrote:
         | It also seems to open much larger files than other editors will
         | handle without breaking a sweat. Not my daily driver but I keep
         | it for those files.
        
       | rubyist5eva wrote:
       | I switched to Nova about 6 months ago - great editor and
       | development seems supercharged compared to BBEdit.
        
         | LukeBMM wrote:
         | I keep meaning to pick up Nova out of love for Panic, but every
         | time I've tried a new editor[0] I end up switching back to
         | BBEdit.
         | 
         | 0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25135058#25162222
        
           | masterof0 wrote:
           | Same, the UI of Nova is too flashy for my taste, I love the
           | simplicity of BBEdit, and the perceived performance
           | difference. I have been using Sublime and BBEdit
           | intermittently , I will give it another try now that they
           | support LSP.
        
       | macrael wrote:
       | LSP is a game changer simultaneously raising our expectations for
       | a code editor and lowering the bar for editors to get there.
        
         | ziml77 wrote:
         | LSP was such an awesome idea. It's amazing to me that this
         | wasn't a thing before Microsoft introduced it in VS Code. It's
         | incredibly useful for every editor.
        
           | munificent wrote:
           | _> It 's amazing to me that this wasn't a thing before
           | Microsoft introduced it in VS Code._
           | 
           | For what it's worth, the static analysis infrastructure we
           | built for Dart was designed this way and, I think, existed
           | slightly before LSP. We used it to provide a nice Dart IDE
           | experience in the Dart Editor (a custom build of Eclipse),
           | IntelliJ, Emacs, Vim, etc. without having to reimplement
           | everything multiple times.
        
             | sandyarmstrong wrote:
             | Cool stuff. I think there were a few similar efforts going
             | on. For example, LSP was based on the protocol developed
             | for OmniSharp, which was an open source .NET-specific
             | implementation started in like 2013 by a Vim fanatic.
        
               | rjzzleep wrote:
               | Interesting! Is there a source for that? I remember
               | OmniSharp. It was a blessing when I could start to use
               | vim when I had to use .NET a few years ago. I had no idea
               | that's what LSP grew out of.
        
               | sandyarmstrong wrote:
               | A source for LSP growing out of OmniSharp? Interestingly
               | I'm not finding much. This isn't a totally accurate
               | history but it's close enough:
               | https://blog.logrocket.com/how-to-use-the-language-
               | server-pr...
               | 
               | The original project was at
               | https://github.com/nosami/Omnisharp (see
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6006954). But over
               | time it was split into several repos.
               | 
               | The history article above says that OmniSharp started out
               | on Roslyn, but actually it originally used NRefactory.
               | The old server is here:
               | https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-server
               | 
               | EDIT: Oh, just found
               | https://github.com/microsoft/language-server-
               | protocol/wiki/P... . This cites OmniSharp and also the
               | TypeScript language server.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | DJBunnies wrote:
       | Holy cow, this the same BBEdit I used as a teenager with System
       | 7.
       | 
       | Incredible. Makes me nostalgic for resource forks & resedit.
        
         | mactunes wrote:
         | Yes, same here! I got my first Mac with 7.5.3. It was a
         | Performa 5200CD. Good times :)
        
         | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
         | Yup. I've been using it for at least that long.
         | 
         | I've tried "trendier" editors, from time to time, but always
         | end up going back to BBEdit.
        
           | artiszt wrote:
           | yap. not to forget TextWrangler
        
             | Klonoar wrote:
             | You can set BBEdits icon to be TextWrangler, for those who
             | are nostalgic and don't know.
        
             | Nursie wrote:
             | They rolled it in to BBEdit a couple of releases ago.
             | TextWrangler is now effectively 'BBEdit free mode'
        
       | jfb wrote:
       | I really wish it supported keyboard rebinding. I _really_ wish
       | this. I would happily pay for it, over and over again, but the
       | tab key behaviour when editing structured text is just ... wrong.
        
       | kasperset wrote:
       | I miss multiple cursor on non-contiguous text with BBEdit. I feel
       | like this feature should be standard. I was blown by that feature
       | when I saw it first on Sublime text.
        
         | TheTon wrote:
         | It supports rectangular selection via option drag, including
         | zero width rectangles, which seems to cover all of the multiple
         | cursor use cases I need. I do realize some other editors
         | implement more multiple cursor features, so I grant that some
         | folks may miss those.
        
         | gcanyon wrote:
         | This is _the_ feature that drives me to Sublime. It's easily
         | half of what I use it for.
        
         | gord288 wrote:
         | > I was blown by that feature
         | 
         | Is the feature Premium? Or only available in free mode? Just
         | wondering...
        
           | kasperset wrote:
           | It is available out of box. I was referring to "Quick Add
           | Next". https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/multiple_selection_wi
           | th_the...
        
         | tharShe wrote:
         | VSCode has this for free. I was never blown by that feature
         | though.
        
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