BareBones is a company that makes BBEdit, the most valuable piece of software on my Macintosh. BBEdit is a tool for writing and manipulating text, like vi, emacs, WordPad, and other editors. But while WordPad and TextEdit are underpowered and poorly thought-through and while vi and emacs are briliant but complex and hard to learn, BBEdit strikes the perfect balance between ease-of-use and power. All of my novels and every story I've written in the past eight years has been written in BBEdit. Every Boing Boing post I've posted (including this one) was written in BBEdit. I've had excellent support from them all along, and every so often, they ship a new version that inevitably fixes whatever minor annoyances I had with the previous version and introduces a few features that I hadn't thought of but which end up being indispensible to my workflow.
Today, BareBones shipped BBEdit 8.0, a $49 upgrade for BBEdit 7.x users, and I've just paid for it and downloaded it, on the strength of new features like Text Factories, a GUI front-end to regular-expression-based search and replace, so that you can do the kind of thing a perl hacker does in one inscrutable line with a series of easy-to-understand drop-down menus; the Documents Drawer, which fixes the slightly clumsy handling of multiple windows in the current BBEdit; and the newly integrated MacOS spell-checker, which fixes the sorely lagging BBEdit spell-checker.
BBEdit upgrades are like Christmas for me. More than any tool on my computer, I live in my text-editor. These upgrades are major quality-of-life enhancers for the likes of me.
