BBEdit Testimonials
We say: “It doesn't suck.®” Here's what some of our devoted customers say:
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John Siracusa Programmer, Writer
What do you do? I'm a web developer and freelance technology writer.
When did you start using BBEdit? I think I started using it around 1993, but it may have been even earlier thanks to some floppy disks I got from a Mac user group meeting.
What do you make? How does BBEdit help? For my day job, I do all my programming in BBEdit: Perl, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, SQL, C, everything. I also write all my articles (for Ars Technica, Macworld, etc.) in BBEdit. I usually write them in HTML, with BBEdit's live HTML preview window open as I do it. When programming, BBEdit provides syntax highlighting, code folding and navigation, context-aware auto-completion, syntax validation, and a scripting mechanism that lets me add my own features and bind them to keyboard shortcuts. When writing prose, BBEdit provides live word and character counts, spell-checking, and all the programming tools that are also relevant to the way I write: HTML preview and syntax checking, search and replace, navigation markers, clippings, and so on. During both tasks, BBEdit is unfailingly reliable, with the best auto-save and backup mechanism of any application I've ever used.
If there's anything cool, important, or fun I've ever done in my life, it was done with BBEdit.
What's your favorite project that BBEdit has helped bring to life? Every day at every real job I've had from the day I graduated school, I've been in front of a Mac typing text and code into BBEdit. The same goes for any programming or writing project I've done at home. So if there's anything cool, important, or fun I've ever done in my life (a Mac OS X review for Ars Technica, a Perl module on CPAN, a small Unix utility) it was done with BBEdit. And I'm writing this in BBEdit right now, of course.
Which feature is your favorite? My all-time favorite feature is probably single- and multi-file search and replace using regular expressions. There are text editors that expose the full power of regular expressions to users, and there are text editors that provide a nice user interface for initiating searches and seeing the results. BBEdit is rare in that it provides both, and has done so for years. An honorable mention goes to the Process Lines and Sort Lines family of features, which are closely related to search. Thanks to these features and a set of custom key bindings, I can process text faster with BBEdit than I can using pipelined Unix command-line tools. Coming from a longtime Unix nerd like me, that's high praise.
