DrunkenBlog

BBEdit repeat

The first time I got asked by someone over the internet why I had been gravitating away towards BBEdit, it was because I was touting Hydra... Now I've been asked the same, but it was within the context of me gravitating away from Hydra SubEthaEdit. Ironic, that.

At any rate, I had an email from the first time I was asked where I actually had it in my saved message folder, which means it's pretty old (so it might not all be relevant, but it was then), but it should get the point across. There's an even longer one about my disappointment with MailSmith, but that's long enough that I wouldn't bother to convert it into HTML unless someone actually asked. Pretty sure you could actually find it at the x4u list if you looked...

Either way, here you go:

From: db lists-_-_-drunkenbatman_-_-_-com
To: Mac OS X for Users x4u@lists.themacintoshguy.com
Subject: Re: [X4U] GoLive alternative?
Date: 07/29/03

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003 10:23:01 +0100,
Chris Sansom wrote:
>> Also keep your eye on Hydra, they've just
>> added in some live html previewing functionality
>> which will prolly get pretty cool. It's not a
>> WYSIWYG editor, but more of a code editor (which
>> works great... i haven't been happy with bbedit
>> lately and have been checking out alternatives).
>
> Hmmm - why are you unhappy with BBEdit?

I've been really disappointed with v7.0 (and mailsmith, also- i've switched from that too). I _loved_ BBEdit, and still use it from time to time... I'm a long time user, prolly 6+ years. It was my right hand man.

Basically it boils down to:

1. The interface has gotten really, really long in the tooth. It's been long in the tooth for ages... it's extremely "dated", and shows no signs of getting cleaned up. I can deal with this, if it "just works", however...
2. v7.x brought me a ton of instability issues over v6.5. A _ton_. It was constantly crashing on various files, always when brought into the foreground. Tech support regarding them was, shall we say, not helpful. It stopped being rock-solid for me, and lost its most valuable trait- not having to worry about it.
3. I primarily used it for HTML/CSS, PHP, shell scripting and its excellent reg expression searching/replacing with directories and files. Not much has been done to improve these areas over the last major updates, although there were some niceties for shell scripting added in with the move to OSX...
4. The pricing is getting out of whack. $189 is a bit pricey for me to be buying a few copies of it, one for my laptop and one for my desktop... both of which I often use at the same time. I'd do it, if I felt like I was getting my money's worth. And yes I know I could buy one copy and run it on both, but it's not my style as I _would_ be using it on both comps simultaneously. So, for someone like me, real functionality/productivity improvements were getting rarer and rarer... and the price was getting really up there. I really don't know what they were thinking- to me, BBedit would be expensive at $99.
5. Seeing (iii), all of those aspects were getting filled by cheaper or even free (*gasp*) products.

For shell scripting, I've found Wisp, which has great syntax highlighting for shell scripting (most others just have c syntax highlighting) and testing, both by running within the terminal or within Wisp. Hydra also does decent tcsh syntax highlighting, but I prefer Wisp for it.

For HTML, I've found a lovely app I just mentioned call Hydra, which has some great features, is stable, has a nice UI and is improving at a really rapid pace. TacoHTML is also good, but the damn thing makes me hungry while I'm working and just isn't my style- but it's a good app. JaneBuilder is good for PHP stuff too.

For CSS, Hydra does a good job for the code and CSSEdit is great for stylesheets. For finding & replacing within files and the like, it really isn't that difficult to do and my terminal is usually up and lively for remote things I'm doing with shell scripts & aliases I've setup for various things.

For example:

for i in *.html; do
mv $i $i.bak
sed 's/bbedit/hydra/g' $i.bak > $i
#rm -f $i.bak
done

The above would go through all the .html files in the directory and replace bbedit with hydra. I could, if I wanted, simply run it within Wisp, or pipe the list of files to it after finding them find $find. Or, since I have Golive & Dreamweaver (doubtful that golive is going to be updated tho) I could do it within one of them if the above scared me.

Do I ever miss BBEdit? Sure, every once in awhile I run into a case where some of its more advanced text-wrangling features would be nice, and I 'knew' it. But even already with an app like hydra I run into cases where I wish BBEdit had the feature... for example I love the multiple document views of Hydra.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    May 28, 2004, at 06:14 AM