BBEdit Testimonials
We say: “It doesn't suck.®” Here's what some of our devoted customers say:
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Jon Alper Web/Media Project Manager
What do you do? I'm a Mac IT guy and Web/Media Project Manager and I used to play one on TV as Director of Technology/R&D at WGBH Interactive for more than 10 years. Now I do those same sorts of things for clients of all kinds at 89 System.
When did you start using BBEdit? I first started using BBEdit on my then-room-mate's Mac IIci before we had that newfangled System 7 so many of the yoots were spoiled on. We had to MultiFinder our way to school. Uphill, both ways. BBEdit was (and still is) a core utility for all things Mac from the text processing it was explicitly designed for to the opening the un-openable and inspecting the contents of the unnerving (logs, other files that raise a security concern).
What do you make? How does BBEdit help? BBEdit is basically open on my Macs at all times. Editing files on remote servers via SFTP in Fetch, serving as my drafting and note taking tool and making it possible for me to do fairly complex automated munging of text without writing custom code. Basically, unless somebody else insists on formatted text, if I write, it's in BBEdit and my drafts almost always are. Much easier to write in BBEdit and then paste into an application that does styled text and apply formatting after composition.
The team built incredible automated publication workflows in BBEdit…tens, hundreds of thousands of pages of highly designed and meaningful content.
What's your favorite project that BBEdit has helped bring to life? Before it was possible (and in some ways it's still not) to have huge (multi-thousand page) web content sites at PBS entirely in a CMS, the team built incredible automated publication workflows in MacPerl and BBEdit. The men and women on that team did amazing things with what was, at the time, a far more limited universe of options for large scale web development and delivery. We relied on BBEdit. Tens, hundreds of thousands of pages of highly designed and meaningful content all moving through BBEdit.
Which feature is your favorite? Multi-file search and replace is a the feature I use most often. For so many mundane tasks, it makes for a huge time saver and not even remotely only for "code" projects either. As for a favorite feature, I'd say syntax coloring. I'm not a coder by trade but I do have to look at and try to understand at least the basic structure of code for a lot of disparate projects. Because I am not a coder and because of the way I process text visually, syntax coloring makes an enormous difference to me in my ability to get a basic understanding of and, when absolutely necessary, modify what I see. Syntax coloring acts like an accessibility feature for me and it's crucial.
