[HN Gopher] BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due
        
       Author : tambourine_man
       Score  : 609 points
       Date   : 2023-06-13 00:23 UTC (22 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (apps.apple.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (apps.apple.com)
        
       | oblib wrote:
       | Most of my daily work is done with BBEdit and has been for over
       | 25 years now.
       | 
       | They saved my butt last year when my old Mac Mini melted down. I
       | had another old Mac Mini a friend gave me and when I contacted
       | BBEdit they gave me a copy to get me back up and running without
       | any hesitation even though I couldn't give them my serial number.
       | 
       | Nothing but respect for them.
        
       | esjeon wrote:
       | I was curious and visited their website:
       | https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/                 >
       | BBEdit 14       >       > It doesn't suck.(r)
       | 
       | Dang, I love it. The feature list looks good enough to back the
       | claim. It almost sounds like an editor for Linux. And I'm also
       | curious if there are any Linux alternatives?
        
       | ycombinete wrote:
       | What is the analogue of BBEdit on Windows? On Linux I guess it's
       | things like EMacs, and Vim?
        
         | AndroidKitKat wrote:
         | Perhaps Notepad++?
        
         | HeckFeck wrote:
         | I liked Programmer's Notepad but I don't think it had the same
         | power as BBEdit.
        
           | kleff wrote:
           | Programmer's Notepad is amazing, its been my goto in Windows
           | for well over a decade at this point. Has everything I need
           | without any bloat, also work fine on large files (I often do
           | regex-searches on huge log files with it).
        
         | metalliqaz wrote:
         | Back in the day it may have been UltraEdit, but these days I'm
         | sure there's something else. I've been using Notepad++ because
         | it's FOSS, but it is probably too quirky to be an analogue
        
       | no_wizard wrote:
       | Wait, the impression I'm getting here is BBEdit is just Rich
       | Siegel now? Does Barebones not have any other engineers working
       | on BBEdit?
       | 
       | Somewhat surprising, but props to Rich, that is some impressive
       | work, above what I already thought was impressive work!
        
         | scarface_74 wrote:
         | John Gruber of daringfireball fame and co-creator of Markdown
         | worked there for awhile. His chapter on regex in the BBEdit
         | manual is widely regarded as the best out there.
        
         | chipotle_coyote wrote:
         | I know Patrick Woolsey is still there. I don't think the
         | company has ever been that big.
        
         | favorited wrote:
         | Sounds pretty bare-bones to me!
        
       | bluedino wrote:
       | Never read an article inside the App Store. That's a first.
        
         | coolandsmartrr wrote:
         | Why not?
        
           | tslater2006 wrote:
           | Guessing they meant "I have never read" and not telling you
           | to "never read"
        
             | jen729w wrote:
             | I find myself writing like this all the time. I omit the
             | 'I', writing it like I say it.
             | 
             | Then I read back my own words and invariably insert the 'I'
             | as I realise it doesn't make sense.
        
               | stefncb wrote:
               | In this particular instance you'd have to disambiguate
               | with "I have" or "I had", I alone would mean the wrong
               | thing.
        
             | schoen wrote:
             | "Read" is a particularly unlucky verb for this because its
             | past participle and imperative form are written the same
             | way. Most other English verbs wouldn't have this particular
             | ambiguity.
             | 
             | "Never eaten a Carolina Reaper pepper, but I'm looking
             | forward to my first time."
             | 
             | "Never eat a Carolina Reaper pepper; you'll regret it."
             | 
             | Wiktionary has a few dozen irregular verbs that could
             | produce an ambiguity like this one:
             | 
             | https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_irregular_v
             | e...
             | 
             | "Never miscast Magic Missile ..."
             | 
             | "Never shut a door on someone's finger ..."
             | 
             | "Never preset the thermostat to 90 degF before going on
             | vacation..."
             | 
             | "Never put an irregular verb in a position where readers
             | might interpret it ambiguously..."
             | 
             | ("... but there's a first time for everything, I guess" /
             | "... you won't be happy with the results")
        
           | bandrami wrote:
           | That's a participle with an elided subject and helper verb,
           | not an imperative. In spoken English the difference in
           | pronunciation makes it obvious.
        
             | bandrami wrote:
             | [dead]
        
         | synicalx wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | username1407 wrote:
         | Me neither, and thanks to Apple's idiotic thought of 1 country
         | = 1 language I'm not even allowed to read it my the language of
         | choice. Thanks Apple!
        
           | tsukikage wrote:
           | 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?"
        
         | perilunar wrote:
         | Same. It's weird because the article link opens the same
         | article in both the browser and in the App Store app, which
         | seems redundant.
        
         | HeckFeck wrote:
         | These interviews with developers in a magazine format is
         | something I'd welcome seeing more. Who doesn't like a good war
         | story?
        
         | tedunangst wrote:
         | It's funny. Safari on iPhone refuses to show the normal options
         | for long press. Really wants to open the store.
        
       | justinator wrote:
       | I moved to TextMate. I can't remember why. Is either of them
       | better than the other these days? I feel like TextMate has been
       | slightly abandoned.
        
         | kergonath wrote:
         | I still use TextMate. I don't know whether development has
         | slowed or stopped, but I haven't had any issue recently. I find
         | it less clunky and nicer than Sublime Text, which is my second
         | choice and my escape route the day TextMate dies. It'd be a
         | pain to convert all those bundles, though. TextMate's support
         | for esoteric language grammars is second to none and last time
         | I checked some of mine depended on features not implemented in
         | Sublime Text.
        
         | Skeime wrote:
         | Yeah, TextMate was great. I think it was the very intuitive way
         | in which you could quickly extend it.
         | 
         | Find yourself typing this thing over and over? Just create a
         | snippet, the interface is just very few clicks away.
         | 
         | Need a bit more power? Turn it into a command, and use whatever
         | scripting language you're comfortable with.
         | 
         | Want to change the color scheme? Here is a nice declarative way
         | to select precisely the syntax elements you want.
         | 
         | (I think part of this was that they had a bunch of short videos
         | on their site showing you how to do this, and then a well-
         | written documentation to accompany it for the details.)
         | 
         | Sadly, with TextMate 2.0, the interface for these things got
         | quite a bit clunkier, and then I left. (I also discovered my
         | preference for modal editing.)
        
       | shanghaikid wrote:
       | Mac: BBEdit, textmate, Win: notepad++, dreamweaver(I really like
       | it) The good old days.
        
       | thathndude wrote:
       | Has Apple done other pieces like this? This is the first time
       | I've read one of these, and it was quite good!
       | 
       | I'd always heard Rich's name tossed around as a developer's
       | developers, but learned a lot more about him and his thinking
       | from this article.
        
         | sbuk wrote:
         | They've been doing them a while. There are pieces on the devs
         | behind Things, as well as interviews with Craig Hockenberry
         | (The Icon Factory), Gus Mueller (Flying Meat) and Ken Case
         | (Omni Group). I'm sure I've also seen one with Cabel Sasser of
         | Panic too.
        
       | tapvt wrote:
       | Editing perl in BBEdit. What a wonderful tool!
        
       | NegativeLatency wrote:
       | Forked and fixed a couple of issues with a bbedit color scheme
       | for vim, enjoy! (It's my daily driver)
       | https://github.com/nburns/bbedit-vim-colors
        
       | robotmlg wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | wsc981 wrote:
         | I've used BBEdit ages ago, but these days SublimeText is fine
         | as well. And perhaps even better (again, not sure since I
         | haven't used BBEdit for ages).
         | 
         | 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.
        
           | roydivision wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | Fomite wrote:
         | Nearly all the research code for my lab is written in BBEdit.
        
         | dkarras wrote:
         | yeah I never use BBEdit day to day but I have it installed in
         | my drive for those times where I have to wrangle big files.
        
       | e28eta wrote:
       | Lots of love for BBEdit. I appreciate it as a long-lived, native
       | Mac text editor. It hasn't stagnated, instead incrementally
       | improving for decades.
       | 
       | Discovering the command line tools was a very good day for me. I
       | really like the built-in (two way) diff, and it's my $EDITOR of
       | choice on mac.
        
         | abhibeckert wrote:
         | I also love BBEdit, and while it hasn't stagnated it also
         | hasn't kept up either.
         | 
         | I've moved on to VSCode which has so many more features than
         | BBEdit - it's not even close.
        
       | AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
       | I started using BBedit around 1995. If I hadn't left Apple/MacOS
       | for Linux about 15 years ago, I would definitely still be a
       | (gladly paying) BBedit user!
        
         | rvense wrote:
         | Same story here basically, I loved BBEdit back in the pre-OS X
         | era, especially after I installed Macsbug and learned how to
         | dig my essays out of memory and write them to disk if anything
         | crashed while I was writing...
         | 
         | I was on a Mac constantly from 1989-2009, I'd became a bit of a
         | free software zealot and moved from an iBook to a ThinkPad.
         | It's funny, because a lot of people were making the opposite
         | move, and as I understand it the early 2010's are looked at as
         | a bit of a by-gone golden age for Apple now. Can I ask why you
         | chose to move?
        
       | im_down_w_otp wrote:
       | BBEdit was an essential component of not having to deal with the
       | terrible editor & even worse runtime stability of CodeWarrior for
       | a spell in a past life of mine.
       | 
       | Thank you, BBEdit.
       | 
       | Also, you're low-key responsible for my lifelong unrealized quest
       | to give my Linux workstation sane keyboard shortcuts.
        
         | girvo wrote:
         | > CodeWarrior
         | 
         | Oh heck, you've just dredged up some absolutely horrific
         | repressed memories of that pile of junk. It was _impressive_
         | how unstable it was.
         | 
         | It's funny too, these days I'm in embedded development again,
         | and it's a markedly different experience to those days, though
         | still amusingly unstable at times too.
        
           | rvense wrote:
           | Interesting. Do you remember which version (or approximate
           | year) you're referring to?
           | 
           | I've recently been writing my first real app for Mac OS 9,
           | using C++ (MacZoop framework) and Codewarrior Pro 5 on a G4.
           | There's some features I miss from my modern developer
           | environment (decent version control!), but other than that
           | it's been a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Certainly I've
           | had no stability issues at all with the IDE.
        
             | girvo wrote:
             | 2004-2005! Couldn't tell you the version though I'm afraid.
             | I had nothing but issues with it, man it frustrated me
             | haha. It's possible my memory has made the experience worse
             | than it actually was however
        
               | rvense wrote:
               | I've no reason to doubt your experience at all, I'm
               | really just idly curious. Was that on Windows though?
               | 2004-2005 I think it was all but gone from the Mac, and
               | people had moved to Project Builder (later Xcode), but
               | maybe you were still working on some older project.
               | 
               | AFAIK the current CodeWarrior is based on Eclipse, if
               | they're still updating it.
        
               | girvo wrote:
               | I think it was, yes, and specifically for some embedded
               | toolchain that required it. It would regularly lock up,
               | crash, and lose my work. Though it's quite possible the
               | toolchain was at least partially the problem, and I wish
               | I could remember which one it was. I might go digging
               | through my old backups, I'm curious myself now
        
               | rvense wrote:
               | After Freescale bought Metrowerks (1996? '98?), there
               | were versions of CodeWarrior made for many of Freescale's
               | embedded chips, which were obviously very common.
               | 
               | Again, in spite of my current experience I don't doubt
               | for a second that you had a lot of issues. Software was
               | just a lot worse back then, and having now dipped my toes
               | in the frameworks and languages used in the circa 2000
               | period, I'm not really surprised why. There's 0
               | references to automated testing in any of the programming
               | books or documentation I've looked at, and as far as I
               | can tell absolutely no support for it. Version control is
               | extremely rudimentary. I didn't programme professionally
               | until early last decade, and some of what I can infer to
               | be have been normal is just baffling for me.
        
           | im_down_w_otp wrote:
           | Back in the good ol' days of no memory protection on the Mac
           | and the fun of trying to figure out if it was you or your dev
           | environment that just unrecoverably hosed the system state.
        
         | cat_plus_plus wrote:
         | Really? I though CodeWarrior for PalmOS was a champ compared to
         | Visual C++ for embedded platforms. Lets start with a fully
         | functional and bug free compiler with standard library and all
         | features working.
        
       | eviks wrote:
       | > 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.)"
       | 
       | That's not utmost respect, but condescension when you think you
       | always know /can figure out better than the user
        
         | globular-toast wrote:
         | Developers who do what the users tell them to build the worst
         | stuff. Imagine what a state your plumbing would be if you told
         | your plumber where to put the pipes. The correct line of
         | questioning is not "what do you want?" but "what is the problem
         | you are having?".
        
         | labster wrote:
         | No that's just reality. If you give the user exactly what they
         | asked for, you shipped a bad product.
        
           | eviks wrote:
           | No, that's just your caricature of reality. Reality depends
           | entirely on the reality of what the users asked for and the
           | product.
        
             | gattilorenz wrote:
             | I think you're reading this the wrong way, there's
             | (literally!) decades of scientific literature about it, and
             | it's not a problem of being condescending.
             | 
             | For a gentle non-scientific introduction:
             | https://www.forbes.com/sites/leoyeykelis/2018/05/10/why-
             | its-...
             | 
             | If you actually want to know more, a very accessible
             | textbook: https://books.google.nl/books/about/Interaction_D
             | esign.html?...
        
               | eviks wrote:
               | Could you me just a tad more specific instead of
               | sciencing around? For example, I've read your article and
               | its argument is simply not relevant
               | 
               | > Good UX research, however, does not ask people what
               | they want. That's because people find it difficult to put
               | themselves in imaginary situations, especially in cases
               | where they need to picture a future with products and
               | technology that do not currently exist.
               | 
               | But this is a text editor, gazillions of those exist,
               | with various UI paradigms and features, it simply makes
               | no sense to claim that all users, even those very
               | experienced in alternative apps (so nothing imaginary
               | about that), don't know better than BBEdit's small design
               | team, thus it's ok to ignore their explicit asks because
               | you know "what they really need"
               | 
               | Like in the example cited above with removing hard
               | wrapping, the quoted argument "The two states (hard wrap
               | while typing) and soft wrapping have the same visual
               | result and would tend to cause considerable confusion. "
               | is patently false as there exist editors with very clear
               | separation of the two (and those being confused can
               | always disable either). But then if you think you know
               | better, you keep being "utmost-respectfully" wrong for
               | years
        
               | gattilorenz wrote:
               | I cannot give you a specific example in this case,
               | because I don't know the feature, use case and problem...
               | which is kinda the issue at hand. But the claim that
               | "users are familiar with other apps, we should give them
               | the exactly same features if they ask for it" is not very
               | sound: first of all, not all users will be familiar with
               | other editors. Those familiar might have had a very hard
               | time learning them at first. And, in general, it's good
               | to ask "why do you want that? Show me how you use it and
               | why you think it's important, and we can test multiple
               | design alternatives until we found something that works
               | for you", instead of "let me add feature X from editor Y"
               | (both because there would be no innovation, but also no
               | reason to change editors).
               | 
               | For the article, the relevant part was: " In general, a
               | researcher will first ask a customer to walk through how
               | they currently solve a particular problem. As part of
               | this investigation, they will probe at the user's pain
               | points and existing workarounds". What is the hard
               | wrapping used for? Maybe there's a better way of solving
               | the same problem to begin with, and hard wrapping is just
               | a band-aid instead of the proper solution to the
               | underlying goal?
               | 
               | By the way, UX research doesn't claim that designers
               | cannot get anything wrong or that users can never get
               | anything's right - that's a silly simplification of
               | course. But I don't think the the BBEdit author was
               | trying to promote such an absolutist view.
        
             | [deleted]
        
           | gattilorenz wrote:
           | Yes, that's UX design 101: the user doesn't know, and the
           | product designer doesn't know. That's why user experience is
           | hard...
        
           | zarzavat wrote:
           | In other words, you built "The Homer"
        
       | pfych wrote:
       | BBEdit was my first editor when I was learning to program for the
       | web on my Power PC bubble mac. It's crazy to think it was
       | considered old when I was using it and that it's still around
       | now!
        
       | steve_adams_86 wrote:
       | This was my first "real" editor. I guess that was... 23 years
       | ago. Wow. Writing HTML and discovering CSS, it was a window into
       | a brand new world.
       | 
       | Toggling between BBEdit and the CSS Zen Garden. Those were the
       | days.
        
       | chazeon wrote:
       | I recently bout BBedit on their 30th birthday event.
       | 
       | BBEdit / TextMate has the Mac feel that I enjoy editing long-form
       | text in (recently, a lot of latex manuscripts); meanwhile, vscode
       | is where I write code. I don't know what contributes to this
       | difference exactly, but they occupy a different part of the
       | market as of now.
        
       | TomMasz wrote:
       | I've never _not_ had BBEdit installed.
        
       | pinebox wrote:
       | Free version of TextWrangler was the sweet spot, for me. BBEdit
       | is more than I need for day-to-day and seems comparatively slow.
       | Not an "upgrade" I wanted.
        
         | spacebacon wrote:
         | same... fond memories of TextWrangler.
        
       | comechao wrote:
       | BBEdit is always in my Dock :)
        
       | layer8 wrote:
       | Copy that doesn't open in the app store: https://archive.ph/aDYK2
        
       | MrResearcher wrote:
       | What data structures were used to represent the content in-memory
       | and edits? Was it some sort of an immutable set of chunks
       | organized into a tree, similar to Word?
        
       | aduffy wrote:
       | 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!
        
         | softirq wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | extr wrote:
           | In VS Code I have an extension that allows me to highlight
           | code and get immediate edits/advice from GPT-4. What's the
           | VIM analogue there?
        
             | softirq wrote:
             | Just doing a basic google search shows me at least 4
             | plugins that interface with chat GPT. I personally don't
             | use them because my workplace doesn't allow feeding our
             | code to another companies backend.
        
         | keyle wrote:
         | Kind of the same here. You know they've added LSP support to
         | BBEdit recently and if you wanted a native solution... Well it
         | does 95% of it all.
        
       | BooneJS wrote:
       | By the time I switched to Mac it was already MacOS X Jaguar and
       | it had vi which I was used to. I didn't buy my first BBEdit
       | license until 2 years ago (!!) thanks to a blog post I read. It's
       | a great editor. I've always liked macOS because it felt like the
       | Linux I use at work, but BBEdit is a great reason to not run vim
       | fullscreen.
        
       | meerita wrote:
       | 2004 was the last year I used BBEdit.
        
       | notnotjake wrote:
       | Love BBEdit for everyday text stuff. I love how lightweight, yet
       | powerful it is.
        
       | tqwhite wrote:
       | I'm reading this thread and am, again, surprised by the fact of
       | people changing editors willy nilly. I have customized my bbedit
       | experience endlessly. I have text filters, dynamic snippets,
       | script elements, 'text factory's and a zillion project files (I
       | often have two or three for one project so I can open the
       | configuration or the UI or the back end separately.
       | 
       | I can't imagine choosing to give up those decades of custom
       | features I've built into my workflow. Nor can I figure out how I
       | would work the practicalities. I would say that it is literally
       | impossible for me to change editors at this point.
       | 
       | And, I consider this all to be a tribute to bbedit's flexibility,
       | speed, and solid, hard core reliability. I love that program. If
       | they offered a paid release every year, I would ante up happily.
        
         | reaperducer wrote:
         | _I 'm reading this thread and am, again, surprised by the fact
         | of people changing editors willy nilly._
         | 
         | Based on reading discussions on HN over the last decade or so,
         | it seems that a lot of people on HN don't choose editors
         | because it's the best tool for the job, but because of the same
         | factors that affect the fashion world: Flash, style, color,
         | trend, posturing, and peer pressure.
         | 
         | I've banged out code on everything from a green-screen Wyse
         | terminal to Panic's Nova, and there's nothing better for
         | reducing productivity than changing and reconfiguring your
         | tools in the middle of a project.
        
       | thaumaturgy wrote:
       | 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.)
        
         | dietrichepp wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | tnamorfd wrote:
       | I've been a developer for three decades and have done a few
       | things that I'd like to think are worthy of some merit - but my
       | credit as one of the 'unindicted co-conspirators' in BBEdit is
       | absolutely one of the things I'm most proud of!
        
       | deltarholamda wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | no_wizard wrote:
         | 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.
         | 
         | Weirdly behind feature set still
        
           | js2 wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | kstrauser wrote:
             | That's where I'm at, too.
             | 
             | Scanning a doc into DT and then immediately shredding the
             | paper is one of life's little pleasures.
        
         | marssaxman wrote:
         | > in today's world where a lot of email doesn't come multipart
         | MIME, just HTML, it would be less useful
         | 
         | I find that ignoring mail which lacks a text/plain part makes
         | for a pretty decent spam filter.
        
           | deltarholamda wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | marssaxman wrote:
             | That is so absurd it's kind of funny!
        
         | caycep wrote:
         | 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
        
       | systems_glitch wrote:
       | I still run it on vintage Macs. Pretty sure it was the first
       | programmer's editor I used on Macintosh. A lot of the Macs in
       | college (iMac G5/10.4 era) had TextMate, which I got pretty used
       | to, but still ran BBEdit at home.
       | 
       | Great program!
        
       | tqwhite wrote:
       | And I failed to mention the one aspect where bbedit exceeds every
       | editor I have ever tried (a few years ago, I actually did a half
       | year where I tried everything): Search and Replace.
       | 
       | The Search and Replace feature of bbedit is absolutely the best
       | ever. When I am forced to use another editor, I am appalled by
       | contrast. Since I use this 1000 times a day, I will never change.
       | bbedit forever!
        
       | masswerk wrote:
       | I'm an ardent user of BBEdit since 1996, and it's the single
       | solid piece of software, I've seen in all these years.
        
       | vlowther wrote:
       | BBEdit is my weapon of choice for reading massive log dumps and
       | database dumps for support at $DAYJOB. It does not seem to ever
       | choke no matter how many hundreds of megabytes if text I need to
       | plow through.
        
         | abhibeckert wrote:
         | BBEdit was known for that in the past, but it's a weak point
         | these days. It definitely has an upper limit on filesizes and
         | will "choke" on large files (probably only slightly larger than
         | the log files you're using it for).
         | 
         | Other apps are much better at large files. The APFS filesystem
         | has a maximum file size of 8 Exabytes and plenty of other text
         | editors can handle file sizes that large without any issues.
        
         | 404mm wrote:
         | That and random snippets of text that live as unsaved documents
         | for days to months.
         | 
         | BBEdit is a big misfit for me and how I use editors. It's great
         | at transforming text and zillion of other features but I get my
         | work done in VSCode or PyCharm. My true preference was Atom.
         | RIP
         | 
         | Even with this all, I still install BBEdit on every device I
         | can.
        
       | criddell wrote:
       | > 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.
        
         | selcuka wrote:
         | > 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."
        
           | veidr wrote:
           | 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
        
           | teo_zero wrote:
           | 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...
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | modriano wrote:
             | The Henry Ford quote is based on the premise that most
             | people lack the technical knowledge and problem
             | understanding needed to develop visionary solutions, and
             | would just try to give you what they think is best for you
             | (a faster horse, a cleaner car, a fancy new dependency,
             | etc).
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | The Henry Ford quote is both dumb and extremely
               | misapplied. It basically tells you that a successful,
               | category-defining mass market product, does not look like
               | what you'd get if you _imagined_ asking a bunch of
               | friends a quick question and took their imagined ad-hoc
               | answers at face value.
               | 
               | I say imagined, because any _actual_ horse owner would
               | tell Ford they don 't want a faster horse - they want a
               | horse that's stronger, eats less, and _shits less_ , as
               | those were the real constraints of the horse platform[0].
               | 
               | (There's also a healthy dose of condescension in assuming
               | "most people lack the (...) problem understanding". This
               | _may_ be true when you 're thinking up a new class of a
               | mass-market product. It's definitely not true when you're
               | playing with some specialized product people already use
               | productively.)
               | 
               | Also note the context here is _pushing_ a new product
               | category on the mass market. It 's not about making an
               | incremental improvement to existing product category, nor
               | making an incremental improvement to existing product -
               | two scenarios which most companies operate in, and in
               | which this quote is most misapplied. In those scenarios,
               | your users - again, note, not _prospective clients_ , but
               | _existing users_ - most likely know the problem space
               | _way_ better than you do. They may have problems
               | communicating the details of their feedback, so you need
               | to actually _try_ and understand what they 're saying.
               | Talk to them. Have them show you how they work.
               | 
               | --
               | 
               | [0] - Strength translates to work/carrying capacity,
               | eating less would give exponential savings on logistics
               | to large horse operators, such as militaries, and as for
               | the last part... suffice it to say that in Ford's times,
               | horse manure was a bigger and more immediate health
               | problem than air pollution is today.
        
               | NikkiA wrote:
               | It's also a puzzling anecdote, since Ford did not
               | _invent_ the motor car, it already existed when he
               | started making his cars. And his early cars were slower
               | than horses or horse-and-carriages of the time.
        
               | zimzam wrote:
               | I've had non-technical users, who used the application
               | daily, ask me to implement a large form where every input
               | was a radio button.
               | 
               | When I suggested using a more appropriate mix of drop-
               | downs, checkboxes and radio buttons they readily
               | accepted.
               | 
               | It turns out they thought radio buttons would be easier
               | for me to implement. They aren't stupid people, they just
               | don't have any idea of how things work outside their
               | domain.
        
             | kevincox wrote:
             | If anything the anecdote should be about identifying what
             | users actually want. They didn't really want a faster
             | horse, they wanted a way to get around faster. They
             | couldn't envision a different way so they embedded the
             | "faster horse" solution in their response. However Henry
             | Ford correctly identifies the core problem and gave them
             | that.
        
       | sleepybrett wrote:
       | I pretty much stopped using bbedit when moving over to osx from
       | system9. It had the ability to run emacs (there were some emacs
       | ports for pre osx mac, but they all annoyed me in one way or
       | another) and that was a nice return 'home' for me. I remember
       | having to work on a project on a windows machine in the early
       | aughts that drove me nut until someone handed me notepad++ and
       | called it 'bbedit for windows'.
       | 
       | That all said, nice of apple to write a little puff piece about
       | it and it's author. BBedit was a workhorse for many and continues
       | to be for many. It's one of the few very successful mac apps that
       | apple didn't just steal (like watson).
        
       | tiffanyh wrote:
       | UltraEdit
       | 
       | I never understood why there was so much love for BBEdit on Mac
       | and so little love for UltraEdit on Windows.
       | 
       | They were both released around the same time, selling to the same
       | audience just on different platforms.
       | 
       | This was also during a time where there was many options.
        
         | leokennis wrote:
         | I'm a Mac user, but for my job I have a company Windows laptop.
         | It used to come with UE and I absolutely loved it. I work with
         | large XML files (think 500 MB) a lot and UE would
         | open/format/xpath/regex/etc. them with 0 issue.
         | 
         | Then upper management forgot they employed engineers and did
         | not renew the license.
         | 
         | Now I'm stuck with VS Code which chokes when I open a 20 MB
         | file.
        
           | globular-toast wrote:
           | UltraEdit has "true" support for large files meaning it
           | doesn't have to load the whole thing into memory like most
           | other editors (including BBEdit).
        
         | aeyes wrote:
         | I guess Mac users are more easily impressed because there is
         | (was) less choice and UltraEdit(32) wasn't around on the
         | platform at the time.
         | 
         | It's still my editor of choice but it's a shame that they
         | switched to a subscription model.
        
         | shusaku wrote:
         | Much like iOS seems to drive app sales better than android, in
         | the old days Macs had the best shareware
        
         | sigzero wrote:
         | UltraEdit is on the Mac now. It's not as polished as the
         | Windows version but it is good and you get UltraCompare with it
         | as well.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | miles wrote:
       | 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.
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://tinyapps.org/blog/201807150700_hard_wrap_window_widt...
        
         | justinator wrote:
         | I remember arguing for tabs, and he was like, "LOL I don't
         | think so". So how'd that turn out?
        
         | Asooka wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | veidr wrote:
         | > (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?
         | 
         | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
        
         | ferbivore wrote:
         | 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"?
        
           | wjnc wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | nickm12 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | copperx wrote:
           | The reason I fell in love with Emacs decades ago was because
           | how it could do both kinds of wrapping so easily.
        
         | rvense wrote:
         | I wish my company would adopt this philosophy. We seem to just
         | add features when people ask for them, and it really starts to
         | show after a while.
        
         | alwillis wrote:
         | > 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.
        
           | miles wrote:
           | Thank you for the tip. I'm in and out of several text editors
           | during the day, but only use BBEdit once or twice a month
           | (usually for multi-file search and replace via regex).
           | 
           | EDIT: According to GPT-4, "BBEdit's current scripting model
           | doesn't provide a way to directly access the current window
           | width, and this type of functionality is not typically
           | available in most text editors' scripting APIs." If anyone
           | knows a workaround, please share it here.
        
             | sebzim4500 wrote:
             | Turns out that the strategy of saying something false in
             | order to get the right answer works even better when the
             | false statement comes from an LLM. I guess I'll keep that
             | in mind.
        
               | ptx wrote:
               | Please also keep in mind that if the corrections fail to
               | materialize, posting false information will have polluted
               | the knowledge pool for no benefit.
        
             | masswerk wrote:
             | BTW, BBEdit has a `hard wrap` scripting command with a
             | limit option (page guide, window width, character width).
             | 
             | And, no, GPT is not a tool for factual verification, it
             | creates probable chains of words that are likely to be
             | found impressive by humans.
        
             | tantalor wrote:
             | Okay let's just take GPT's word for it.
        
             | miles wrote:
             | Apologies all. Thank you for the information.
        
             | mistersquid wrote:
             | > only use BBEdit once or twice a month (usually for multi-
             | file search and replace via regex).
             | 
             | BBEdit's regular expression support is jaw-dropping.
             | Combined with how quickly it can update north of 10,000
             | files has kept me using BBedit for over 25 (!) years.
             | 
             | And I'm looking forward the next quarter century.
        
             | edgyquant wrote:
             | I can't believe this has to be said here of all places.
             | GPT-4 is not a search engine of factual knowledge. You can
             | not assume anything it says is true and not just a made up
             | grouping of words that look nice together.
        
             | neurobashing wrote:
             | According to Script Debugger, hardly the massive powerhouse
             | that may end humanity like GPT-4, it's the "bounds"
             | property of a window, specifically the 3rd element.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | veidr wrote:
               | In pixels, yes, but that's not trivial to convert to
               | character width...
        
             | phanimahesh wrote:
             | I'm somehat worried about the incidental harm caused by
             | people relying on GPT's word chain hallucinations as facts
             | for something critical.
             | 
             | Most laypersons don't understand that GPT is not a factual
             | search engine. I'm increasingly seeing people who should
             | know better also forget this now and then.
        
               | copperx wrote:
               | It is also important to note that GPT is _not_ useless as
               | a search engine.
        
               | bryanrasmussen wrote:
               | the problem is that the quality of data on the web is
               | such you can't really trust what you get from google
               | either, so you need to go back to the pre-google days of
               | using specialized search engines, or accept that some of
               | what you get back is likely polluted and you don't have
               | the resources to verify everything.
        
               | j16sdiz wrote:
               | with google, at least you could know where and who that
               | piece of information is written..
               | 
               | with gpt, you got nothing but the same convincing tone.
        
               | abraae wrote:
               | Nail on the head.
               | 
               | The web is a swamp of hot garbage, in large part thanks
               | to Google SEO incentives.
               | 
               | If Google hadn't poisoned the well, and if searching
               | pulled up good content instead of ads designed to look
               | like search results, and search results that link to web
               | pages that take 5 screenfuls to convey one sentence of
               | information, they wouldn't be looking down the barrel at
               | an existential threat.
        
         | akasakahakada wrote:
         | LOL kind of the same story as mind.
         | 
         | 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.
        
           | pr0zac wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | kemayo wrote:
             | It does indeed have working print functionality. As you
             | say, it's on macOS and so this automatically means it has
             | PDF export.
             | 
             | I'll admit I've never used said print functionality, so I
             | can't rule out that it's missing something that some people
             | consider important.
        
       | vr46 wrote:
       | I have fond memories of writing HTML with it, and various other
       | things, but I almost never use it anymore. The regex playground
       | is awesome but I never think to use it, even though I still keep
       | a licensed copy around.
       | 
       | I use Neovim a lot more and then perhaps VSCode, as I live in a
       | world with a lot more going on and a lot more integration with
       | other tools, a very different world to that which makes BBEdit a
       | go-to app. Also, I don't think it's that impressive with large
       | files. Still, gotta respect a hit.
       | 
       | Power to Rich Siegel.
        
       | arthurofbabylon wrote:
       | This is great editorial coverage by the App Store team. I've long
       | thought Apple to be discarding a great opportunity with marginal
       | curation and storytelling regarding great apps, niche or
       | otherwise, so this is encouraging to see. I hope we see more like
       | this BBEdit story.
        
       | iampivot wrote:
       | An inline search pane would be nice. Not because it's necessarily
       | better, but it aligns with a lot of other tools that we use.
        
         | Y-bar wrote:
         | v11 and v12 had that, did they remove it?
        
         | dchest wrote:
         | Ctrl+S for inline (as opposed to Cmd+F for dialog)
        
           | iampivot wrote:
           | Thx!
        
       | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
       | That must be a few years old.
       | 
       | It's been more than 30 years, since BBEdit was released.
       | 
       | I use it a lot.
       | 
       | I never warmed to any of the alternatives.
        
         | keyle wrote:
         | I remember Coda was good when it first came out! ... and then,
         | well, that went sideways.
         | 
         | It really takes an exceptional product to last eons and remain
         | relevant.
         | 
         | BBEdit feels more like a product of love than oriented for-
         | profit.
        
           | tqwhite wrote:
           | A few years ago I noticed that all the other editors seemed
           | to have online enthusiasm. Having used bbedit for decades and
           | having exchanged email as tech support many, many times, I
           | asked Rich if bbedit was a thriving or if it was just hanging
           | on. He assured me that thriving was the better
           | characterization.
           | 
           | I would interpret that to say for-profit is applicable
           | though, having had projects that lasted a long time (not
           | thirty years!), I can say that sticking with it that long is
           | always, also, a labor of love.
        
       | jmaker wrote:
       | Oh wow he's taking care of a gray parrot, how sweet. The guys are
       | incredibly smart btw
        
       | Cockbrand wrote:
       | <3 BBEdit - it's become a bit outdated in terms of UI/UX and
       | features, but it's still my daily driver for anything plain text.
       | Its Regex search & replace still rules over a lot of other GUI
       | editors. I've pretty much upgraded to each new version since my
       | first boxed copy about 25 years ago. Back then BBEdit was quite
       | the powerhouse for HTML development, and it helped me finish a
       | lot of projects.
       | 
       | Very happy to see Apple paying recognition!
        
       | alwillis wrote:
       | 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...
        
         | sethd wrote:
         | > 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.
        
           | galleywest200 wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | alwillis wrote:
             | > 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.
             | 
             | This is exactly what I meant.
        
           | deltarholamda wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | scelerat wrote:
       | To this day I still use BBEdit even though most of my daily meat-
       | and-potatoes text editing and development is done in neovim. For
       | some things it's just really nice features and UI, in particular:
       | - the multi-file search and replace,        - the diff tool,
       | - shell worksheets
       | 
       | and so much else.
       | 
       | BBEdit has always been a fundamentally fast and reliable text
       | multi-tool and I've used it since 1994 when I first started
       | poking around HTML and learning Perl.
        
       | ggm wrote:
       | I never used it, but I certainly had to support web devs who did,
       | and who needed me to open up FTP to the website so they could
       | integrated-upload their markup.
       | 
       | There were a bunch of "does it do PASV" conversations. Because,
       | FTP is sufficiently old-school (like telnet) that it believed in
       | archaisms of how to open a distinct data port to a command port,
       | and it made firewalls very unhappy unless you could use "passive
       | mode" which was firewall friendly.
       | 
       | We wrote our own CMS using DAV (in Apache), and I wrote a push-
       | publish engine which was on the "inside" master and would push
       | out via rsync a checked out state respecting symlinks. It was
       | kind-of like "stow" but for the networked web from a repo.
       | 
       | the BBEdit users weren't happy, they had their own idea of a CVS
       | tree using "tortoiseCVS", we had many fine arguments about how to
       | do it (most of the web was theirs but a small portion was not,
       | and was in fact Apache::Perl rendered which was in a code repo,
       | and combining multiple sources of authority over web state is
       | always a very confusing place to be)
        
         | BlackFingolfin wrote:
         | I think you may be mixing up some memories? tortoiseCVS was
         | (is?) a Windows product and has nothing to do with BBEdit
         | (which only runs on MacOS). I don't recall BBEdit ever imposing
         | restrictions on CVS repositories (and I used it extensively
         | with those for a decade, though only since about 1999).
         | 
         | I am also confused by what point you are trying to make
         | regarding FTP? "Web devs wanted to upload files via FTP" sounds
         | pretty normal for a website 15-20 years ago? Of course it also
         | unclear when your story takes place...
        
           | ggm wrote:
           | From memory, our webdevs used a mixture of mac and windows.
           | They had a private CVS repo, Some of them were using Tortoise
           | and editing on windows, and others used BBEdit. (I thought
           | there was a cvs client GUI on Mac too but I guess not)
           | 
           | BBEdit integrated some publish/checkin features as I
           | understood it but you had to have enough CVS fu to manage
           | some of it "outside" the tool.
           | 
           | (and, what I read suggests CVS was something you had to
           | actually install on the MacOS of that day, from some repo or
           | another, probably whatever proceeded XCode. the developer
           | tool bundle?)
           | 
           | It was entirely normal to do FTP 15-20 years ago. The problem
           | was, that FTP was bifurcated into two forms. "traditional"
           | FTP with two channels one of which was a back call to the
           | client and PASV mode which was the one which worked through
           | firewalls better, where the server set up a path for the
           | client to call into.
           | 
           | Maybe you never had these issues. I know a lot of people at
           | the time (like me) fought with FTP services and connecting
           | clients who couldn't enable PASV, or didn't know how to turn
           | it on, or whose firewall admin wasn't up to speed with
           | enabling things to make FTP work.
           | 
           | I forgot to note that the permission set needed to make XHTML
           | and like functions work meant setting the execute bit on some
           | uploaded content, sometimes. It wasn't adequate to just mark
           | a file as .xhtml always, for things like SSI to work let
           | alone CGI scripts. You can do that in FTP if you can issue
           | the commands, or you can ask FTP to preserve state for you,
           | but again from hazy memory CVS didn't always like chmod state
           | of files checking things in and out.
           | 
           | My story takes place around 1999/2002-3. If I mis remember
           | forgive me. I had already been working 17 years online by the
           | late 90s, and this BBEdit stuff is now 20 years ago for me. I
           | forget more than I remember.
        
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