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Great Text Utility
January 25, 2020

Great Text Utility

Michael Prewitt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with BBEdit

As far as I know, I am the sole user of BBEdit at my organization, although I believe there may be a few users of its free sibling, TextWrangler. I have been using BBEdit for a long time, at least 15 years, maybe longer. The license I use at work is actually my own. Although there are many competitors in its space, I am still a devoted user. BBEdit is fast-loading, is powerful at many forms of text editing, supports GREP (regular expressions), supports many languages with the ability to add support for new ones, has advanced file system and internet tools, and works well for web development. I continue to use it because it gets the job done and I haven't found a better solution.
  • BBEdit has great file tools: access the file system, including hidden files and folders; direct FTP/SFTP support; access to Git and Subversion; support for projects (related files, such as the files for a website); access contents of ZIP archives; change file encoding (UTF, etc.); and more.
  • BBEdit has numerous commands for formatting text and especially code. There are many ways to select, copy, convert, format, search, replace, compare, and tidy up text and code projects. Its text processing is available to the OS X Automator app.
  • I've not seen that BBEdit is useful for optimizing code. That is, it doesn't give you hints about ways to improve your code, such as flagging inefficient or obsolete methods or commands. Its syntax checking is relatively basic.
  • The software is somewhat expensive (currently about $50 for a new license), although the price has come down from what it used to be. Other similar apps such as Brackets by Adobe or Visual Studio Code by Microsoft are free.
  • I bought my own license, so it cost my company nothing. In the big picture, it is a low-cost app, even though similar free options exist.
  • I am a frequent GREP (regular expression) user, and the GREP support in this app has saved me a lot of time with some complex searches or extraction projects. Steps that might have taken hours to do manually can be done in mere minutes. Possibly the app paid for itself in just one or two of those instances.
Compared to Brackets, BBEdit feels faster, leaner, and has more utility value. Brackets feel oriented towards coders specifically, whereas BBEdit is like a toolbox of text tools for a wide array of needs. I feel like the same is probably true for Visual Studio Code, but I have barely used it. Visual Studio Code is used by my company's IT department, and from observation, it seems like a very capable coding application. I expect to dig into it further when I have time.
I have never needed to contact support for this app.

Do you think BBEdit delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with BBEdit's feature set?

Yes

Did BBEdit live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of BBEdit go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy BBEdit again?

Yes

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.