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 well suited for 1) Coding and Development - Writing and editing code, Quick prototyping and testing of code snippets, Debugging and inspecting code using syntax highlighting and line numbering, 2) web development - Creating and editing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other web-related files .Managing and organizing web projects with multiple files and directories. Not suited for - 1) processing huge files 2) graphic designing 3) complex gui designs 3) Data Analysis and Manipulation - Editing and cleaning up text-based data files before importing them into analytical tools. Applying regular expressions to extract, transform, and manipulate data. 4) System Administration and IT - change system configuration file
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 Notepad++ allows us to keep open files in tabs. Like in a web browser, these tabs let us access these files quickly and easily. Furthermore, even if we forget to save the files when closing the program or shutting down the PC, Notepad++ retains them in the open tabs when we reopen it. Notepad++ supports many different file types. We usually save our files created in Notepad as normal text files, but sometimes as JSON, PHP, and HTML files. Notepad++ is lightweight and requires little resources. Using it is snappy and responsive. The developer of Notepad++ frequently updates the software with bug fixes, performance improvements and new features. 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 UI looks a bit dated. Sometimes the number of options are overwhelming and require a quick search to figure out where to locate a particular function. Some way to do a diff between files would be great. Still need to resort to another paid app for that - unless it is a buried function I don't know about or there's a plugin for it. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I use it every day for 13 years already and it never disappointed me
Read full review Usability Many of the features are not out of the box. We have install them separately
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 I haven't needed to utilize any support related to Notepad++. I guess this is a good thing because I found it to be quite intuitive. There are almost infinite features you can tweak and plugins you can download but I haven't had to do that because Notepad++ is really good right out of the box.
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 Notepad for Windows, Microsoft Word...LibreOffice Writer....I have used all of these for code writing and editing. Once again I like the universal feel of Notepad++. Basic Notepad, is just that, basic...and kind of clunky for what it is. This is a cool that I have installed on all my computers and also keep it on a thumb drive if I need it elsewhere.
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 Productivity has increased for developers. It's free so instead of buying a piece of software, you can use this to replace many of them that may only specialize in one thing. It gives our developers confidence knowing they have such a reliable, free tool at their disposal. Read full review ScreenShots