Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Editing Text

660 words

I just don't get why people are so fond of BBEdit.

Sure, I'm probably not the best person to talk about BBEdit - having been an Alpha user back in the days of classical MacOS. While Alpha may not have been quite as polished as BBEdit it has always been more powerful. Most notably when it comes to editing TeX files Alpha has always been first-of-class. And so I even forked out the incredible amount of US$ 30 or so to pay the license fee many years ago.

Mind you, that's US$ 30 a text editor. After all they managed to give you a copy of vi with your computer in the 1970s. If there were anything comparable to Moore's Law in the realm of software, we'd have an easy-to-use, nice-to-look-at version of emacs (including the ability to make coffee) now...

Since then Alpha grew quite a lot more and probably became for text files what GraphicConverter is for images. If it can't edit it, it's probably not a text file. They also improved all the fancy bits about TeX editing. I hardly used it, however. Not only because I stopped reading the change logs at some stage but also because I'm quite simple minded about editing text.

Thus, when realising that there won't be an OS X version of Alpha as I knew it, but only some half-assed cross-platform "improvement", Alphatk, that loses hands-down when it comes to looks and useability I was disappointed but not too unhappy. The text editor provided with TeXShop is neither wonderfully fast nor ridiculously powerful but still it is sufficient for my needs. There is syntax colouring, there is an excellent integration with TeX, there is a menu to jump to the different sections of the document and as of recently it will even insert ^{} when I press ^ and can easily be made to insert $$ with the cursor between the two characters when pressing $. Add in TextExtras for completion features and I am quite happy.

For the perfect Text editor I'd still like to have the 'tab' stops that Alpha used to provide: little marks that the cursor will jump to when pressing the tab key. Thus, pressing ^ could insert ^{}• with the cursor between the braces and pressing tab after filling the braces will jump to the • mark. It's very convenient. Actually I had implemented this feature and mailed it to the author of TeXShop about a year ago but due to a poor backup-strategy of mine (hint: never edit any files in your Incoming folder if you don't make backups of it), the highly competent staff at Apple's repair centre losing my hard drive and the author of TeXShop losing some of his e-mail, this patch got lost and I was too lazy to re-do it since.

Which brings me back to the topic of BBEdit. I can't see why it should exist. You'll pay a whopping US$ 179 (US$ 119 for academic users) for, right, a text editor the only remarkable features of which seem to be some HTML support, the fact that it's less of a pain to look at than emacs or Alpha's OSX sibling, the ability to open files from FTP volumes (in the days where mounting FTP volumes in the Finder is starting to come of age), being faster to display large files than the notably slow NSTextView and more preference panes than I have fingers to set up – right – a text editor.

Hm, I guess, I find all this a bit ridiculous. It's a text editor, dammit. And what made people write about BBEdit recently is, that its previously free light version has been replaced by a stripped down US$ 49 basic text editor.

Now there's a charge for what used to be for free [...]

Tom LehrerMy Home Town

Addendum: Apparently BBEdit Light continues to exist for current users.

February 26, 2003, 23:28

Trackback

Trackback “BBEdit not as cool these days” from The Colonel Sanders Conspiracy:

One of the better text editors (to me anyway) has been BBEdit for the Mac. I read Quarter Life Crisis’ post about BBEdit and tend to agree with him. BBEdit is overpriced at $179. It is a text ed…

February 26, 2003, 23:42

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