Re: Pepper (uh yeah)

Posted by Watts on December 5 2004, 10:02:
In Reply to: Re: Pepper (uh yeah) posted by T.Jung:

> > I finally shelled out $80 for a competing product

> Which one?
> I keep looking at BBEdit, but $199 is too expensive for me.

It was indeed BBEdit -- at the time I bought it, BBEdit 6.5 was the current edition, and I got the competitive upgrade price of $79. Anyone can actually still get that discount, although now it's $129. (The key is that "BBEdit Lite," which you can download for free from Barebones' FTP site, is one of the qualifying programs!)

BBEdit certainly has its quirks and it *is* overpriced, but if your primary use for a text editor is web development, there's nothing else like it -- it's about 90% of the power of Dreamweaver with much greater speed at half the price. If your primary use for a text editor is other sorts of code, though, it's worth looking at the much cheaper TextWrangler. (Which isn't to say that BBEdit might not offer some other compelling features for programmers; it just seems from my experience that BBEdit only shows serious advantages over its competition in the web arena.)

There's also the "new kid" on the block, TextMate, which is interesting but to me shows a lot of "version 1 syndrome." It makes a lot of claims about stuff it does that BBEdit doesn't do, although with the exception of folding, it's stuff that BBEdit actually *does* do, which is sort of perversely amusing. To be fair, some of what BBEdit does isn't obvious at first, second or even tenth glance; I owned it for nearly two years before I really figured out the power of its glossary system. On the flip side, TextMate is quite cheap.

And, speaking of cheap, one should never discount Vim and Emacs. They have high learning curves and you're definitely better off if you're comfortable with Unix, but there *are* native OS X GUI versions of both of them out there and neither one of them lacks in the feature department. (The most common complaint with Emacs is that it does too much, which, well, is probably true!)

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> > > I finally shelled out $80 for a competing product > > Which one? > > I keep looking at BBEdit, but $199 is too expensive for me. > It was indeed BBEdit -- at the time I bought it, BBEdit 6.5 was the current edition, and I got the competitive upgrade price of $79. Anyone can actually still get that discount, although now it's $129. (The key is that "BBEdit Lite," which you can download for free from Barebones' FTP site, is one of the qualifying programs!) > BBEdit certainly has its quirks and it *is* overpriced, but if your primary use for a text editor is web development, there's nothing else like it -- it's about 90% of the power of Dreamweaver with much greater speed at half the price. If your primary use for a text editor is other sorts of code, though, it's worth looking at the much cheaper TextWrangler. (Which isn't to say that BBEdit might not offer some other compelling features for programmers; it just seems from my experience that BBEdit only shows serious advantages over its competition in the web arena.) > There's also the "new kid" on the block, TextMate, which is interesting but to me shows a lot of "version 1 syndrome." It makes a lot of claims about stuff it does that BBEdit doesn't do, although with the exception of folding, it's stuff that BBEdit actually *does* do, which is sort of perversely amusing. To be fair, some of what BBEdit does isn't obvious at first, second or even tenth glance; I owned it for nearly two years before I really figured out the power of its glossary system. On the flip side, TextMate is quite cheap. > And, speaking of cheap, one should never discount Vim and Emacs. They have high learning curves and you're definitely better off if you're comfortable with Unix, but there *are* native OS X GUI versions of both of them out there and neither one of them lacks in the feature department. (The most common complaint with Emacs is that it does too much, which, well, is probably true!)