For years now it seems like everyone except me has totally loved the BBEdit text editor from Bare Bones Software. I could just never come to like it. I will admit though to having occasionally used the Lite version and its successor TextWrangler for a few tasks — zapping Gremlins, the mysterious little weird and invisible characters which could make some HTML pages disintegrate, and recently for the ‘drawer’ which holds individual documents. My text editor of passion, Tex-Edit Plus, doesn’t readily handle either of those.
Now, though, I’ve decided to join the crowd of BBEdit owners, though I still don’t expect to be using it a great deal.
Press Release: Bare Bones Software … today announced special “Oktoberfest” pricing on cross-upgrade licenses for BBEdit. Through October 31, qualifying customers can purchase this award-winning HTML and text editor for the Macintosh for only US$99.
Tex-Edit Plus has many fantastic features and I’ve been working with it a long time. One of my many favourite features is that I can a] colour bits of text at random and b] set a colour for replaced text within a find and replace. I just can’t get Bbedit (or TextWrangler) to do either of these. Sure BBEdit will do syntax colouring, eg of an HTML document, but it beats me how to colour one word of plain text. Choosing a colour from the Fonts panel makes not the slightest bit of difference.
I use the find and colour replace facility pretty well every time I do a find and replace in TE+. That instant feedback of seeing what was replaced is astoundingly useful. This morning I opened a text document I’d written but which another person had edited and marked with a symbol at each edit. A quick replace highlighted the various edits. I coloured the edited text in blue and my original in green and could drag and drop between documents, all the while the colours clued to me in to where I was up to and what I was doing.
I realize I could write hundreds of words on TE+ so shall stop here. If you haven’t tried it then it’s worth looking in to. If you’ve been waiting for BBEdit to have a sale, then go get it now.
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