Comment by darkteflon
3 days ago
So, I’ve used BBEdit briefly in the past, and I’m familiar with its stellar reputation. But I’m confused by some of the comments here. Are people mainly using it in place of something like Obsidian? Vim? Emacs? VS Code? Notes? It doesn’t look like it would make for a great IDE but seems to have very powerful text transformation abilities. If I work in VS Code and use Obsidian for notes, is there still a place for something like this? What kinds of workflows are people using it for?
When I use it, it’s in place of Emacs or Zed and dealing with smallish projects in well-supported languages. The phrase I hear a lot is that it’s a “Mac-assed Mac app”, integrated into that environment far more than the others. For instance, you can’t script Emacs with Shortcuts or AppleScript.
This isn’t objectively better or worse. They have features BBEdit doesn’t. It has features they don’t. The rest largely comes down to taste.
I've used it for basically any text editing task. Quickly jotting stuff down for later, web development, writing articles, drafting emails, whatever. I've used VS Code a lot and have used Obsidian for notes/worldbuilding in TTRPGs, but neither really gave me anything I wasn't already getting in BBEdit for general-purpose coding and text editing, and neither come close to its ability to do elaborate text transformations.
These days I use emacs for most of that stuff, but I have such a fondness for BBEdit, and still drop into it for regex stuff enough, that I'm buying the update.