HTML Editor Reviews | Reviews and Discussion of (X)HTML Coding Tools

Review: BBEdit 8

Ease of use, efficiency, and personal comfort are the primary criteria I’ve been using to rate the editors on this site. A piece of software can have all the bells and whistles in the world, but if it doesn’t help you get your work done quickly, accurately, and easily, then all those features don’t amount to much. What an ominous way to introduce this review of BBEdit, the long-standing and revered editor for the Mac!

But before a posse of enraged BBEdit users beats down my door, let me say this: BBEdit is an incredibly powerful editor with more functionality than I could ever use. As Greg Storey said in my interview with him, BBEdit “has features that are beyond my abilities and needs.” In essence, I’m not rating BBEdit as a product, but as an HTML editor, based on the criteria I’ve set out above. As such, BBEdit is both more and less of a tool than I need. While it has many features I’ll never use, it’s also “missing” those I require to get my work done the way I want.

What I Like

• Amazing search and replace. Fast, powerful. Has its own menu in the menu bar. (I’ve gotta start learning regular expressions!)
• “New HTML Document” Wizard for setting up new (X)HTML pages.
• Document drawer for easy navigation between open documents.
• Text Factories, which allow you to create a list of text-manipulation actions to perform on a file or set of files. Batch processing, essentially.
• “Find Differences” and bbdiff command-line tool for comparing the contents of files and folders.
• Change tracking and source-code versioning via Subversion and Perforce (not something I use, but which may interest others).
• Integrated spelling checker.
• HTML syntax checker (in general, though, I use the Firefox HTML Validator extension for this).

Gripes

• The user interface, especially those little, nondescript icons at the top of the editor. I don’t want to have to click on an icon to find out what it is. Granted, I don’t work much on my Mac, but when I do, I’m always drawn in by the look and feel of the apps. Not so much with BBEdit.
• When I apply tags to text using the Markup menu, the tabs end up getting wrapped up with the text. So, for example, if I want to create an unordered list from the following bit of selected text: one two three I end up with: <ul> <li>one</li> <li>   two</li> <li>   three</li> </ul>
• The price. $199 USD is a bit steep. However, if you register Bare Bones’ free editor, TextWrangler, you can “cross-grade” to BBEdit for a significant discount.
• At the risk of sounding like a broken record (oops, showing my age a bit with that cliche), “I love me some code hinting.” While all the tags and CSS elements/attributes can be found via the HTML and CSS palettes, I don’t want to have to use my mouse to input tags. I’ll use my mouse to navigate a document, but not to insert common bits of text, which is why code hinting is so handy.

Wish List

• Traditional code hinting in addition to or instead of the HTML Palettes.

Overall

I think the thing that hurts BBEdit the most (as far as this review goes, anyway) is what so many people like about it: It’s robust, powerful, and can handle many, many types of tasks. BBEdit serves a huge range of people, from programmers to designers to writers, and has to provide each group with their own tools. However, I’m only looking for a piece of software that can elegantly handle the HTML, CSS, and PHP tasks I want to throw at it. This is what makes a program like skEdit such a great editor: focus. It handles HTML and CSS better than most other editors on the Mac. BBEdit, on the other hand, lacks this focus.

Overall, BBEdit is an amazing text editor, but I don’t recommend it if you’re going to spend most of your time writing HTML, CSS, and PHP.

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