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.)
I keep a (badly in need of an update!) repo of BBEdit stuff[1], it's mainly Ruby. I guess BBEdit runs the script in a similar way to a shell in that it's the shebang line that matters most. If your system supports it, then I believe BBEdit will support it. Downloading it for a wee look and having the manual open[2] while you try is well worth it.
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.
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.
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?
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/
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?)
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!
I switched to BBEdit after 10 years of being an emacs user. The main reason was I could actually use all the features of BBEdit, versus emacs where I could never remember the commands. BBEdit also had commands for most of the text transformations where I would have to break out elisp or go looking for someone else who had solved the problem. Eventually features like code folding and editing files over SSH locked me in for good.
The main issue over the years was that BBEdit's support as a code editor was never as good as emacs. Syntax coloring was anemic and it couldn't indent lines etc. I'll have to try out the LSP support because that might address that issue.
