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 ...

Comments

Pricey

[colonel.sys]

Yes, BB is pretty cool. But:

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

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

Re:Pricey

[dogzilla]

I agree that BBEdit is getting a little pricey, but Hydra really isn't comparable to BBEdit yet. It has some cool features, and certainly shows a lot of promise, but comparing any current version of BBEdit to Hydra at this point just makes Hydra look like "My First Text Editor".

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

BBedit going out with a bang?

[jeeves99]

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

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

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

Re:BBedit going out with a bang?

[pudge]

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.

Re:BBedit going out with a bang?

[michaelggreer]

I've been coding my pages in xhtml and css, so the layout is separated from the content. When making JSPs for such pages, BBEdit has been wonderful, and Dreamweaver is useless. Dreamweaver is great for some kinds of pages, but is incredibly slow and buggy on the Mac. I mean, terrible. BBEdit just does what it claims, and I have used it since its inception.

Re:BBedit going out with a bang?

[jcbphi]

Some would argue that in the long run, when your beautiful mess isn't rendering properly and its time to debug your HTML+CSS+PHP+who-knows-what, you may regret not knowing the intricacies of your code.

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

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

Re:BBedit going out with a bang?

[Arkham]

I do use BBEdit for HTML now and then, but 99% of the time I'm using it to write java, perl, python, or shell script. BBEdit is a multipurpose editor, and different people use it for different things.

The "edit over ftp" feature is what keeps me using it. I know Windows tools like Visual SlickEdit offer these features, but I am so productive with BBEdit that it's hard to consider anything else.

Re:Question

[jcbphi]

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).