Forwarding Address: OS X

Sunday, February 10, 2002

Good tip, Paul! Here's a note I sent to my pal Fred, who was looking for advice on an html editor and wanted to know why he should consider something as feature-rich as BBEdit for such a simple task:
Here's why you should use BBEdit:

1. You will thank yourself for learning a bull-goose king-hell text editor. Once you've gotten the BBEdit bug, you won't go back. I write *novels* in BBEdit. I edit exported Excel spreadsheets in BBEdit. Its UI is awesome, progressively revealing greater and greater depth as you require it, while presenting a dead-simple initial state for beginners.

2. It's free. BBEdit lite does almost everything BBEdit does, absolutely gratis.

3. It's extensible: There's a wealth of excellent BBEdit plugins that operate in both the free and payware version.

4. It's independent. BareBones Software is a small shop that makes fantastic software. Once you're ready to pay for it (all of $89 the last time I checked), you'll be supporting a wonderful gang of coders.

5. It's an easy entrée to powerful computing concepts. BBEdit supports (but doesn't demand) the use of Regular Expressions (grep) in its powerful, multi-file-aware search-and-replace tool, as well as emacs keymappings for editing. The help files are incredible, and will hold your hand as you gradually learn these vital, crossplatform concepts.

BBEdit: It Doesn't Suck.

(unpaid plug!)