BBEdit is a text editor from Bare Bones software headquartered in Massachusetts.
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Overleaf
Score 7.6 out of 10
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Overleaf is a collaborative writing and publishing system designed to make the process of producing academic papers much quicker for both authors and publishers, from Writelatex Limited in London.
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.
Overleaf is good to use in a lot of scenarios where something is to be written as a group. However, I believe that it is only good up to a certain amount of people working on the document at once. While I am unsure when it becomes too much, I got no doubt that there is a limit for when it is that good. Though normally, our group size of up to six people has been fine to work with in Overleaf.
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.
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's easy to use for a variety of skill levels. It has most features you could want from an text editor and LaTeX editor. Collaboration is easy for all skill levels including for first time users. The UI is pleasant enough and the website is quick to load. All the packages you need are available.
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.
Alongside Overleaf, we have tried using Microsoft Word and Google Docs to write reports. While they all let you write in the same document at once, Overleaf just works better for us. Microsoft Word locks the paragraph someone else is working on to avoid others messing with it before the original writer is done. However, it is often slow to open those paragraphs up for others to edit. Google Docs is the hardest one of them to make a good layout on, though with the app, it can be good for proofreading on the go.
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.
