BBEdit 8.0: More Muscular But Worthwhile

On 9/1/04 10:27 AM, "Adam Bell" <abellaccesswave.ca> wrote:

> With respect to BBE8 the bottom line is that I'll probably stick with
> 7.1 paid up, and use the lite version of 8. It will be interesting to
> see what 8 lite does that 7 paid-up won't. If 8 lite is better, Bare
> Bones is in trouble.
>
> [BBEdit Lite is a different product now, so I have no idea what features may
> creep into it from BBEdit 8.0. -Adam]

Specifically, BBEdit lite is a dead product, and has been for some time, the
last version being 6.1. BBEdit lite was replaced by TextWrangler, which is
not free.

[Doh! That's right - forgot about that. It's just TextWrangler now, and as I noted before, it may have the right subset of the BBEdit feature set for you. -Adam]

--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

On 2/9/2004 3:27 AM, "Adam Bell" <abellaccesswave.ca> spake thus:

> More muscular, clearly, as Adam Engst points out. Worth $65 Cdn to
> upgrade from 7.1? I haven't convinced myself of that. $20 US, sure,
> $50 US, I don't think so. A glance at VersionTracker reviews shows
> that I'm not alone in this view, either - there seems to be a good
> deal of sticker shock and awe, if I can mix my metaphor.

I'm not sure why --- it's not as if they've just suddenly started charging
$US49 for major upgrades. I know that the 7.0 upgrade was that price, and
I'm pretty sure that previous versions were as well. (If I were at home, I
could tell you for sure, as I could look up my credit card records in
Quicken.) I suspect most of the people complaining about the price are
people who don't use it as often as, say, I do.

There were a large number of posts on the BBEdit-Talk mailing list shortly
after the announcement along the lines of "here, take my money" (in fact, a
couple said exactly that :) I paid up as soon as I discovered that they'd
added the ability to easily create language syntax colouring modules without
programming (I created one for Oracle PL/SQL this morning from a standing
start in about 20 minutes flat). Personally, this alone was almost worth the
upgrade price. With version 7.0, it was the addition of CVS support that
sucked away my money :)

> There are too many other tools out there for doing pieces of what BBE
> does; [...] Most software systems
> come with their own editor now, so there's no need for BBE in writing
> or editing code (which is what I used it for most often way back
> when) - that would just add another step to the process.

If all you do is edit HTML + CSS, then I agree, there's probably not much in
BBEdit 8.0 that will appeal to you, and it therefore probably isn't worth
the upgrade price. If, on the other hand, you're like me and use it every
day to to edit HTML, CSS, XML, TeX, Unix shell script, Java and pretty much
any other kind of text file you can think of, then it suddenly becomes much
more worthwhile. I pretty much live in BBEdit.

And sure, other tools have editors built into them, but they're not always
as powerful as BBEdit. Plus, I've invested many years learning how BBEdit
works, so I don't really want to have to learn the conventions of another
editor if I can avoid it. Most of the major coding tools let you use BBEdit
as an external editor, and BBEdit lets you compile from within the editor,
so I don't really see that as a major issue. If I could use BBEdit as an
external editor for Entourage, I'd be in heaven :)

If BBEdit 9.0 adds code folding, that'll probably be enough to get me to pay
up again :)

> Personally, I find myself using BBE7 less and less often now [...]
> I own File Buddy too, which is actually better at some types of file
> attribute searches.

Ironically, the situation is the reverse for me. I've been a loyal user of
File Buddy since about version 1.8 or so, but I find I hardly ever use it
these days. About the main use it gets now is batch file renaming, and quite
frankly, the UI for this in File Buddy could be a lot better (but it's way
better than doing it through the command line :) Unless the next version
adds something particularly compelling, I may not bother upgrading, which
pretty much proves the point that Adam made --- everyone has different
priorities.

> I'm finding that this trend toward an update
> price for every version change in software I've owned and used for
> years is slowly eating away at the software that I keep up to date.

Well, both File Buddy and BBEdit have charged for almost all their major
upgrades, so I don't know that I necessarily would call that a trend, and
it's certainly nothing new. I wasn't at all surprised by the $49 price for
BBEdit, because that's what they've always charged (in fact, I think that's
also what I paid for the full version the first time, as I was eligible for
one of their "cross-upgrade" deals).

> If 8 lite is better, Bare Bones is in trouble.

The guys at Bare Bones are pretty smart. I doubt that they'll do anything
that will seriously threaten their main source of revenue :)

--
Nigel Stanger, mailto:nstangerinfoscience.otago.ac.nz
Dept. of Information Science, http://divcom.otago.ac.nz/infosci/
University of Otago, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND. XNS: =Nigel Stanger

On 9/1/04 at 8:27 AM, Adam Bell <abellaccesswave.ca> wrote:

> With respect to BBE8 the bottom line is that I'll probably stick with
> 7.1 paid up, and use the lite version of 8. It will be interesting to
> see what 8 lite does that 7 paid-up won't. If 8 lite is better, Bare
> Bones is in trouble.
>
> [BBEdit Lite is a different product now, so I have no idea what
> features may creep into it from BBEdit 8.0. -Adam]

I do: none.

<http://www.barebones.com/products/bblite/index.shtml>

BBEdit Lite was discontinued when TextWrangler was released.

For the record, though I haven't had the opportunity to check out the 8.0
demo, the new feature list is impressive, and I feel the price is very
reasonable for the 7->8 upgrade. As Adam said, everyone must judge the
value in relation to their needs and their desired workstyle.

--
Todd Ruston
toddhackneyponies.com

For me, BBEdit, while a great application, is simply not worth the price. I'm a student, and even the price for the edu version is way beyond what I can afford.

lucas

On 9/2/04 6:09 PM, "LKM" <tidbitslkmc.ch> wrote:

> For me, BBEdit, while a great application, is simply not worth the
> price. I'm a student, and even the price for the edu version is way
> beyond what I can afford.

So check out Text Wrangler, which has a lot of BBEdit's features at a much
nicer price.

Also, I think they have student prices.
 
 
Kirk
 
        My latest book: How to Do Everything with Mac OS X Panther
                  http://www.mcelhearn.com/htde.html
 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 . . . . . . . kirkmcelhearn.com | http://www.mcelhearn.com . . . . . .
 . . Kirk McElhearn | Chemin de la Lauze | 05600 Guillestre | France . .

>Most notably, Bare Bones claims that it's a full-fledged Unicode program
>now, >so you can work with multiple script systems in the same document
>(in the >previous version, you could use only a single script system at a
>time).

This seems to be true in general, and it's clearly a vast improvement. But
in my initial testing I have so far not gotten Devanagari, Arabic, and
(decomposed) Vietnamese to display correctly. Vietnamese will work if you
download an alternative keyboard. I sent Bare Bones a query about this,
but no response yet.

BBEdit 8 has some very nice features, and I really recommend that if
you're at all interested you download the demo and give it a try.
Nothing to lose but time. :)

I still don't know whether I'll buy it, given my very limited use for
web design and text munging (which Unixy tools can handle for free),
but some of the new features are very well placed. The single window
view is a boon to those of us on 12" Powerbooks, and the preview in
BBEdit (old to some, but new to those of us still on 6.5) is a
wonderful feature. The new Text Factory is a very simple but excellent
way to create very complex text transformations without having to mush
them all together into a single giant regular expression.

Feature idea: It'd be great to have a split screen view with the
preview in one split and the text in another, a la Dreamweaver. Again,
particularly for folks with small screens.

As for pricing, I went and did a TidBITS search to figure out how much
BareBones had historically charged for their software:

v8.0, September 2004, Upgrades $50 or $60
v7.0, November 2002, Upgrades $50 or $60
v6.5, October 2001, $40 to upgrade from any version
v6.0, September 2000, $39 upgrade from any version
v5.0, November 1998, Upgrades $40

As you can see, this latest release was a departure from their normal
release schedule, and is in fact the same price as the last upgrade
was. On the other hand, for people who are skipping versions, the
upgrade price has increased by a whopping 50% from where it was in the
6.5 days and earlier. In the past, BareBones has run a promotional
price for slow adopters to permit them to upgrade at the lower rate
within the first month of the product's release, and frankly, that
would be quite welcome. $60 is a lot to pay for a text editor, let
alone for an upgrade.

In the end, BBEdit is far more than a simple text editor, but it's
still competing with the likes of vi and emacs and comparable programs
on the PC cost far less. (UltraEdit, an excellent text editor, is only
$35, for example.) Perhaps they figure that TextWrangler will become
the tool of choice for the people who don't need all of BBEdit's
features. Maybe they're right.

--Nik

--On Friday, September 3, 2004 1:34 PM -0700 Nik <GerberiNik.net> wrote:

> As for pricing, I went and did a TidBITS search to figure out how much
> BareBones had historically charged for their software:
>
> v8.0, September 2004, Upgrades $50 or $60
> v7.0, November 2002, Upgrades $50 or $60
> v6.5, October 2001, $40 to upgrade from any version
> v6.0, September 2000, $39 upgrade from any version
> v5.0, November 1998, Upgrades $40
>
> As you can see, this latest release was a departure from their normal
> release schedule, and is in fact the same price as the last upgrade was.
> On the other hand, for people who are skipping versions, the upgrade
> price has increased by a whopping 50% from where it was in the 6.5 days
> and earlier.

I was in a middle group and was unpleasantly surprised by the price, though
I did pay it.

I was using BBEdit 6.5 under Mac OS 9, and I didn't feel that 7.0 was a
worthwhile upgrade before I had Mac OS X.

So I got an OS X-capable machine this past April, immediately upgraded to
BBEdit 7.0, and then found myself facing a second paid upgrade less than
six months later.

It would have been nice either if the free-upgrade window had been a bit
longer, or if there was a much lower ($20 or less) price for folks who had
gotten 7.0 during 2004.

(Though as a SAS programmer, I've been waiting for user-configurable syntax
coloring for years and years, so it'll be worth it. I just wish I hadn't
shelled out for V7.0 back in April.)

Dave

On 4/9/2004 8:34 AM, Tom Gewecke at tombluesky.org spake thus:

> I sent Bare Bones a query about this, but no response yet.

No doubt they're buried under the tsunami of bug reports and feature
requests. I've sent in at least three myself in the last two days :) They
are pretty good at sending out acknowledgements once they get to the
messages though.

--
Nigel Stanger, mailto:fnordihug.co.nz
Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND. Fnord.

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Kirk McElhearn wrote:
>>For me, BBEdit, while a great application, is simply not worth the
>>price. I'm a student, and even the price for the edu version is way
>>beyond what I can afford.
>I think they have student prices.

Yeah, as I said, I can't afford it :-)

Besides, the edu price is in my opinion kind of a hoax. There's a
cross-upgrade from BBEdit Lite. The price of the cross upgrade is
US$129, which is pretty much the same as the price for the edu version
(US$119), so effectively, nobody has to pay more than the edu price.

In my opinion, not having a cheaper edu version is a bad decision.
Students interested in BBEdit are basically forced to find cheaper or
free alternatives, which makes them less likely to turn to BBEdit once
they could acutally afford it. Recently, a lot of decent text editors
have appeared on the Mac. SubEthaEdit, skEdit, Tag and TextMate all seem
very promising, and then there are always the usual Unix suspects.
BBEdit isn't the only game in town anymore.

>So check out Text Wrangler, which has a lot of BBEdit's features at a
>much nicer price.

TextWrangler is mostly useless to me. I do most of my Java/C/Objective-C
coding in Xcode, so I'm mainly interested in the HTML features of
BBEdit, and TextWrangler doesn't include them.

Anyway, the original mail I sent to the TidBITS list was a lot longer,
but Adam cut most of it. Complaining about the price wasn't really the
main point of it :-)

[But it was the only point that hadn't already been covered by other messages I posted before yours that morning. :-) -Adam]

Lucas

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Well, if BBEDIT 8.0 is a little steep, there is another excellent text
processor that is free called "VI".

Hey! Don't laugh. i didn't necessarily mean it as a joke. I've used
BBEDIT for a lot of tasks, but keep coming back to VIM (which is
VI-Improved) for programming. It has a lot of power in syntax support
(including syntax based auto-indentation and color coded syntax). And,
as an extra bonus, I never, ever have to use a mouse.

When I program, I like to keep my hands pecking away merrily at the
keys, and although VIM has mouse support and a pull down menu, I never
use them. Yes, there is a learning curve, but it isn't all that steep.
Plus, if you do have to use another platform, there is usually a
version of VIM that will work on that platform.

When I first started using VI, I hated it -- especially because of the
"two mode" editing which has not been a ...uh... "feature" in text
editors and word processors since MSDOS 3.0 came out. But, once I
started to see the logic in its layout, and how I can customize it to
fit my needs, I've really come to depend upon it. So much, that I find
myself hitting the "ESCAPE" key in Microsoft Word when I want to move
the cursor.

--
David Weintraub
davidweintraubworld.net
davidweintraub.name

I'm wondering if anyone had opinions on JEdit as an alternative (or complement) to BBEdit? It is cross-platform, has syntax coloring, extendible, among other modern niceties.

On 9/9/2004 2:12 AM, "kyle_skrinak" <kyle_skrinakspamcop.net> spake thus:

> I'm wondering if anyone had opinions on JEdit <http://www.jedit.org/> as an
> alternative (or complement) to BBEdit? It is cross-platform, has syntax
> coloring, extendible, among other modern niceties.

I tried it briefly a few years, but I didn't like the interface that much
(the problem with cross platform apps is that they generally look like cross
platform apps) and it didn't offer enough advantages over BBEdit to make me
switch. It's probably improved since then, however :) A couple of the Linux
guys here use it a lot and really like it.

--
Nigel Stanger, mailto:nstangerinfoscience.otago.ac.nz
Dept. of Information Science, http://divcom.otago.ac.nz/infosci/
University of Otago, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND. XNS: =Nigel Stanger

I'm wondering if there's a good straight-out comparison anywhere between
BBEdit and JEdit, one comparable in quality to the recent comparison on
TidBITS Talk of NoteBook and NoteTaker.

On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 06:38:41 -0700, Albert Gedraitis
<owlbirdsympatico.ca> wrote:
> I'm wondering if there's a good straight-out comparison anywhere between
> BBEdit and JEdit, one comparable in quality to the recent comparison on
> TidBITS Talk of NoteBook and NoteTaker.

They are both text based editors and they both do syntax colouring.
Beyond that, they are not that similar. jEdit is more like gvim than
BBedit, although the interface has the general java application
oddness. It doesn't have, for example, a standard "Open" dialog, and
running it is... odd. It feels like an X11 app.

I tried it out briefly, but could not get it to reliably open my
webDAV mount, and never got it to open files off it. This is not a
problem in any other application.

--
 ::::== <http://2blog.kreme.com> ==::::

--On Thursday, September 2, 2004 9:09 AM -0700 Nigel Stanger
<nstangerinfoscience.otago.ac.nz> wrote:

> On 2/9/2004 3:27 AM, "Adam Bell" <abellaccesswave.ca> spake thus:
>
>> More muscular, clearly, as Adam Engst points out. Worth $65 Cdn to
>> upgrade from 7.1? I haven't convinced myself of that. $20 US, sure,
>> $50 US, I don't think so. A glance at VersionTracker reviews shows
>> that I'm not alone in this view, either - there seems to be a good
>> deal of sticker shock and awe, if I can mix my metaphor.
>

BBEdit is one of the few pieces of software I'll actually pay for an
upgrade before even looking at the changelog (and when I read the changelog
I just start drooling). I've been using it since version 5 and every major
release has added something I wanted.

> I paid up as soon as I discovered that
> they'd added the ability to easily create language syntax colouring
> modules without programming (I created one for Oracle PL/SQL this morning
> from a standing start in about 20 minutes flat). Personally, this alone
> was almost worth the upgrade price. With version 7.0, it was the addition
> of CVS support that sucked away my money :)

Yep, the easier language syntax coloring was big for me (in 7.0 it was
support for SFTP file editing that I wanted). I haven't had the time to
add a language yet, but real soon now I plan on doing one for the Sieve
mail filtering langauage.

>> There are too many other tools out there for doing pieces of what BBE
>> does; [...] Most software systems
>> come with their own editor now, so there's no need for BBE in writing
>> or editing code (which is what I used it for most often way back
>> when) - that would just add another step to the process.
>
> If all you do is edit HTML + CSS, then I agree, there's probably not much
> in BBEdit 8.0 that will appeal to you, and it therefore probably isn't
> worth the upgrade price. If, on the other hand, you're like me and use it
> every day to to edit HTML, CSS, XML, TeX, Unix shell script, Java and
> pretty much any other kind of text file you can think of, then it
> suddenly becomes much more worthwhile. I pretty much live in BBEdit.
>

According to DragThing, BBEdit 7.0 is the 6th most run app I launch (BBEdit
8 has only made it about half-way up the list so far). Even though the
majority of what I do is HTML + CSS + PHP, when I work on those I work on a
lot of files. The new single-window interface is a huge plus, especially
since I can break out documents into separate windows or recombine them
back into a single window.

Kevin

[Moving this to the BBEdit thread from the ManOpen thread... -Adam]

On 9/23/2004 12:17, "Matt Neuburg" <matttidbits.com> wrote:

> What I'm really advertising here is BBEdit's command-line avatar, > "bbedit"; > I use this all the time. For example, it's great for studying the > output > from a big ls command, or a cvs log command. m.

Another command-line tool I love is 'bbdiff'. I use it as the external compare tool in SourceOffsite to view changes in BBEdit using the compare view.