I haven't used BBEdit in over a decade, so my sense of its capabilities are surely out of date.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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
That’s what they’ve replaced TextWrangler with, but if you look at the feature comparison page, the free tier seems to do so much more than TextWrangler did that it feels less accurate to call it that — I was never a TextWrangler user, though, so I’m not qualified to say from experience.
I used to use Applescripts with BBEdit but it's got unix script support too.
For example, I write Ruby scripts that act on the file, either to change to the text or just to run commands, and snippets are available to fill out text with a jumping cursor to replacement points. I'm not sure what Sublime Text packages offer that BBEdit can't as it's been a while since I used ST/Textmate regularly.
