BBEdit is the leading professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh. Specifically crafted in response to the needs of Web authors and software developers, this award-winning product provides an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text. An intelligent interface provides easy access to BBEdit’s best-of-class features, including grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files, project definition tools, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages, code folding, FTP and SFTP open and save, AppleScript, Mac OS X Unix scripting support, text and code completion, and of course a complete set of robust HTML markup tools.
I’ve been using BBEdit for 20 years—I love this app.
I’ve also been using BBEdit for 20+ years. I get along with it, but it has tons of stuff I never use, it’s missing other things I wish it had, it feels like features and settings are all over the place, and SFTP hasn’t worked for me since version 11 (it just never connects, no error). I tried Coda, but the change wasn’t easy enough to be worth the work slowdown. Suggestions? I have my eye on Sublime Text if version 3 ever completes beta.
At least some of the features that you feel are missing from BBEdit can be created yourself via BBEdit’s really excellent AppleScript support. I must have 40 or 50 features that I added to BBEdit that way.
A key thing is that a single AppleScript can access all of the scriptable features of your entire Mac. Not just AppleScript-scriptable features, but also shell scripting features. So all of the features of Photoshop and PHP are available to you in a single AppleScript that runs within BBEdit and uses the contents of your text window as either input or output or both. And of course you can get user input to choose a file, choose a folder, ask the user for a number or some text. Very, very powerful.
I don’t use the BBEdit FTP — I use Transmit. It is worth paying for just for Transmit Disk, which makes your FTP server appear to your Mac to be a mounted local volume. Easy for you to access, but also easy for an AppleScript to access. And Transmit seems to be able to connect to even the funkiest FTP server configurations.
Great app. I use it for both writing and coding. It’s the first app I install on a new Mac. Everybody who works on BBEdit should be really proud.
Yep, I’ve been a Transmit user since it came out, before the name change. BBEdit’s built-in FTP was just handy for certain quick file updates, and it’s a bummer that it no longer works (and that there’s no apparent reason why). Transmit Disk is indeed a nice way to work, as long as the server connection is solid. I lost a few files a couple years back when the connection flapped. Luckily, I don’t work on that server anymore. 🙂