BBEdit Turns 30
wenestvedt (tweet, Hacker News):
First announced on USENET in 1992, BBEdit has always offered powerful text-editing to Mac users. This week it turns thirty, and is still going strong!
Some of its features remain unmatched, like the great multi-file search. […] Syntax high-lighting, autocomplete, and the first regular expression engine I can remember on Macs (except for maybe Torquemada the Inquisitor?), and multi-platform file encoding have been helping Mac programmers and web developers for decades.
I’ve been using it since a year or two later, and I doubt there’s an app I’ve spent more time in. And let’s not forget the excellent documentation and customer support that go along with the app.
Previously:
Update (2022-04-15): John Gruber (tweet):
Eight years later I was working at Bare Bones Software. My lasting contribution: tweaking the user manual’s Grep chapter when BBEdit 6.something adopted the PCRE regular expression engine; theretofore it had been using a heavily modified version of Henry Spencer’s original library.
18 years ago I created Markdown in BBEdit, with the intention of using it from BBEdit. That’s worked out pretty well — just about every long piece I’ve written for Daring Fireball was written in BBEdit (including this one, natch). At that time, I considered BBEdit mature and well-established.
Update (2023-05-11): Today is the 30th anniversary of BBEdit becoming a commercial product. The company is celebrating by offering it on sale for $30 (Hacker News).
Update (2023-05-15): Gus Mueller:
I still remember discovering BBEdit 2.5 back in my college days, and was instantly hooked. I can even remember the office I was in when I started it up for the first time. BBEdit had this certain … way and feel about itself, it was 100% at home on the Mac and it was amazing.
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
I never used BBEdit proper but for years I did use Bare Bones Software's free alternatives for my super light editing needs, first BBEdit Lite Free on classic Mac OS and TextWrangler on OS X. Those were solid apps too and I always sung the praises for the main app to any who had greater needs than I. Good software and it's cool to see a company stick around for so long solely on the quality of their product. Increasingly a rarity.
