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.
I like the macro feature for transforming text. For example, taking a CSV file of data and quickly turning it into a set of SQL "insert" statements. Also, useful for this is the find/replace feature using regular expressions such as taking a URL QueryString and breaking all the parameters into separate lines and perhaps sorting them for review.
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?
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.
When you want to quickly edit a file, TextPad starts up quickly and has many features over Microsoft Notepad. Visual Studio Code is an alternative in that it is full-featured and will edit text files but is slower at startup. I prefer the macro feature in TextPad due to its simplicity.
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.
