BBEdit 8

On the plane flight over I was reworking one of my web sites, basically rebuilding from the ground up with content, look & feel, and navigation. I was using the latest version of BBEdit, version 8. I have to say that the more I work with BBEdit, the more I find it to be my favorite editor, on any platform. It does all the things I want to do with text and stays out of my way.

Now keep in mind that my basic text authoring approach is that most of the time I can use plain old ascii text, because it's going to be in email. When I am writing something that needs formatting, I'm going to do it as a web page, not as a Word attachment. Why not Word, you ask? Well, for one thing, lots of people don't have Word - don't forget that Microsoft Office costs hundreds of dollars. But pretty much everybody has a web browser. For another thing, Word just gets in my way too much - it thinks it's smarter than I am, which I can't stand.

But BBEdit just puts it all in plain visible text on the screen, and it highlights markup and syntax from common languages, and it's fast and just plain works.

John Gruber has his finger on what makes it a great application, and why the new version is a worthy update, in a recent post on Daring Fireball.

The appeal of BBEdit is in its balance of powerful text-editing features and an elegant, intuitive, and unabashedly Macintosh-style interface — and where by “interface” I don’t mean in the sense of superficial cosmetic appeal, but in the deeper, interactive sense.