Likelihood to Recommend I'm primarily a graphic designer who does occasional web development. For me, BBEdit works very well. I use it both for developer projects (editing code, editing system files) and for general text processing (cleaning up, formatting, or extracting text). I like that it offers real-time previews of edits to web project files. It comes with some nice editor themes and supports adding more or customizing them. I expect that for some coders, it will be inadequate. It is not an IDE. On the other end of the spectrum, someone who expects an experience more like Microsoft Word will be very disappointed; or if they wanted something more along the lines of Windows Notepad, they may find it to be overkill. It is an ASCII text editor with many advanced commands and tools built-in.
Read full review Microsoft Visual Studio Code is highly recommended for the development of systems and / or complex applications entrusted to work teams under a specific methodology, and its use is also recommended for the maintenance of previously developed applications.
It is not recommended as a learning environment for developers with little experience as the learning curve would be too high
Read full review Pros BBEdit remembers what I had open, so I never have to worry about losing work when I accidentally close the software. It will hold onto information almost indefinitely, so that the next time I open a program, I can access the information that I may have forgotten to save. Thankfully, its save function is also very simple to use, so I recommend still saving your work as needed. Scripts are the most important aspect of BBEdit for the company I work for. Being able to import scripts and create new ones all in the same location are great. Read full review Very accessible -- it's compatible with all platforms and environments, free to install, and fast to open Strong native support for many languages, and very strong extensibility to provide advanced language features Git integration is top-notch, often displaying a better history, diff, and merge interface that is otherwise available in version control systems Read full review Cons The cost of this product has just become too much for the functionality that most people need. You can find free or $10 tools that do what most people need to do. The BBEdit program has lots of functionality, but could it be too much? Are there too many options? It seems that there are too many upgrades. Read full review Lack of button bar like ones found in Visual Studio. Lack of integrated help that could link to YouTube, Channel 9, or other Microsoft videos on how to learn about features. Integration with Team Foundation Server. Would like to see it having some sort of integration into a Web API testing harness. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Solid tool that provides everything you need to develop most types of applications. The only reason not a 10 is that if you are doing large distributed teams on Enterprise level, Professional does provide more tools to support that and would be worth the cost.
Read full review Usability This is a tool for programmers and it works like many others. If you are in the development world already then you will be sailing in no time with Microsoft Visual Studio Code. It is also great for new developers and it is very easy to use and you can get all the tools you need in one place as you begin to learn.
Read full review Support Rating I've been using BBEdit — no joke — for nearly three decades now. Believe it or not, I'm still getting "upgrade pricing" 13 versions later. Bare Bones' support has always been stellar, and pricing continues to be affordable compared to similar tools.
Read full review Active development means filing a bug on the GitHub repo typically gets you a response within 4 days. There are plugins for almost everything you need, whether it be linting,
Vim emulation, even language servers (which I use to code in Scala). There is well-maintained official documentation. The only thing missing is forums. The closest thing is GitHub issues, which typically has the answers but is hard to sift through -- there are currently 78k issues.
Read full review Alternatives Considered BBEdit wins over
TextEdit every time. They are as different as chalk and cheese. I am so glad we moved to BBEdit.
Read full review [Microsoft] Visual Studio Code beats the competition due to its extensibility. Their robust extensions architecture combined with the plethora of mostly free extensions written by the community can't be beaten. The fact that this tool itself is provided by a world-recognized company, Microsoft, free of charge is phenomenal. The goodwill garnered by them is immeasurable. Other tools I've used were missing features or were just too rigid, too complicated, or too unsophisticated for my liking. The fact that VS Code is easy to mold to my will with the right extensions seals the deal.
Read full review Return on Investment It saves me time, not only with web projects, but even with design, when I want to strip out formatting in text, I bring it in to BBEdit to clean it up. Read full review Positive impact on minimizing time wasted by employees with software installation and setup Positive impact on reducing spend on software licensing Positive impact on minimizing time used to manage different applications for different purposes - this performs all of the functions we need in basic coding Read full review ScreenShots