BBEdit 11.5

Rich Siegel and his super star team at Barebones have come out with a major update of BBEdit. With 11.5, settings can now be synced with iCloud drive, folder comparison, Textmate-style escape completion, and bug fixes and changes galore. See the release notes for the 150+ improvements.

BBEdit's search and replace functions and overall robustness are the first things I miss when I have to develop on Windows. Call me old school, but BBEdit is the only editor I truly trust. It is rock solid, speedy, and has a real company, an impressive company and is here to stay. The state of Sublime Text is very dim at best. Even when it is actively updated (when is the keyword here), it is a one-man team who provides inexistent support. The community is rich but shrinking as more and more people switch to Atom. Atom has first-class plugin baked in (rather than tacked-on) and an active startup behind it, but what it has in richness it lacks in garbage Electron speed and nativeness. BBEdit might have less of a brain share amongst programmers, doesn't have the best syntax highlighting, and lacks a super-integrated plugin system, but for me it beats out every other editor in every other way. It is also a great option for journalists, professional bloggers, and other writers of prose.

When I was a child, I read a Dummies web design book. The CD-ROM came with Dreamweaver and BBEdit Lite 5 or 6. Those were the days when Dreamweaver didn't have a good text editor. Markdown didn't exist back then, so the HTML tag menus in BBEdit were revolutionary. Oh, image maps and table layouts...

Even if BBEdit won't be your go-to editor, it is worth keeping around for its text-editing prowess. Kudos to Barebones for improving BBEdit year after year. You guys rock!