Andy Ihnatko, on "the real reason for BBEdit’s endurance"—"It has the one crucial characteristic shared by every truly great creative work: It has a purpose beyond the way it articulates its immediate function." (Macworld)

  • Paul Coleman

    This is where I say I get it, but then profess my love for vim.

  • Mark_Frauenfelder

    I love Andy’s writing. Example:

    “I admit that, in my weaker moments, I sometimes wish that BBEdit could show me boldfaced and italicized text. I have suggested the same to Bare Bones Software on many occasions. In response I get a smile and an acknowledgement that this could be a useful idea—but I also see a light behind that person’s eyes shifting from steady green to blinking amber and then back to steady green. They compared this suggestion to their simple, consistent definition of what BBEdit Is, and didn’t find a match.”

    I highly recommend his podcast: The Ihnatko Almanac

  • http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby

    BBEdit?  What is this 2009?

  • pupdog

    I had the luck to spend just a bit of time in the company of Andy Ihnatko and Rich Siegel (the founder of BareBonesSoftware, the maker of BBEdit) – It would be hard to find 2 more genial, literate Capital-G Geeks, and it was a pretty awesome time…

  • s2redux

    Surprised by the lack of love for BBEdit here; where are the old Mac-hands? I’ve been using it for over 20 years, and it’s still got a top slot in my toolbox — for moving among text encodings, GREPing vast numbers of files, banging out Perl scripts, tweaking HTML and XML, etc.

    Sure, the motto sets it up for under-expectations (“It doesn’t suck”), but this is a first-rate tool. For folks like Andy (and me, and others who have nursed at the Macintosh teat for decades), BBEdit is like the competent, comfortable friend you can always rely on to lend an experienced hand.