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Bare Bones Celebrates 10th Anniversary
An anonymous user writes, "Bare Bones, makers of BBEdit, 'celebrates 3650 days of saving your ass' (according to the new t-shirt) with the the BBEdit Anthology, a limited edition autographed CD with every final commercial release of BBEdit, plus the free versions as 'bonus tracks.' Liner notes are included." It's $250, comes with a BBEdit 7 license, and only 1,000 were produced. OK, the price is a little steep, but it's a collector's item. And the company is also offering a 10% discount on any product orders through June 30, so it is only $225! I still remember the first time I saw BBEdit, a Mac text editor, and I thought, "what, like a word processor?" Some things never change ...
I don't think you understand BBEdit. BBEdit was a great program before it had any built-in HTML functionality, and it still used by many people who never, or rarely, use it to write HTML. I'd be surprised if most people who used it, used it primary for HTML. I highly doubt it.
BBEdit is a fine program for people who want to code their HTML "by hand," but it is much better as a general developer's text editor, which is what it was before, and always will be.
The full version of BBEdit offers quite a lot over BBEdit Lite (which is not much more than a plain text editor). See BBEdit Feature List for a real list of features, but suffice to say BBEdit has enough to be a real coding environment (so long as auto-completion is not your bread and butter).
As for BBEdit vs. vim, they really are two very different pieces of software. vim is quite a lot more powerful, and is infinitely more configurable. However, I find BBEdit offers a much easier environment to work in. Forgetting a command never involves looking through a help file or manpage, and for light jobs its simple enough for my mother to use.
Also, BBEdit has always been the best text editor with a "Mac experience" (standard UI, file handing, etc). Without a cleaned up interface, vim and emacs are second class citizens in much of the Mac world, despite being much more powerful text editors. This alone was enough to make it a worthwhile pruchase for me (though I only paid the academic price).
I do use BBEdit for HTML now and then, but 99% of the time I'm using it to write java, perl, python, or shell script. BBEdit is a multipurpose editor, and different people use it for different things.
The "edit over ftp" feature is what keeps me using it. I know Windows tools like Visual SlickEdit offer these features, but I am so productive with BBEdit that it's hard to consider anything else.
- Vincit qui patitur.