Is BBEdit worth the price?
I learned HMTL on BBEdit and have faithfully upgraded from version 3 onward. When the latest upgrade (version 8) came along I downloaded the demo and liked what I saw. It may be the single most significant upgrade that Bare Bones has ever put out. Yet, when it came time to pull out my credit card to pay for the thing I stopped and found that I am a bit angry.
BBEdit is an excellent product but it is many times more expensive than any other option. The upgrade price is $50 is more than the full retail price of any other Mac editor. The full purchase price of $180 puts it in a different ball park entirely.
The question that I have not yet been able to answer, even after 8 months, is whether BBEdit is worth the price or not, even just upgrading. I’m not knocking the program. As Bare Bones tagline says, “It doesn’t suck.” It maybe the most full featured text editor available on any platform. It has web specific functions that I use every day.
I’m not even knocking Bare Bones Software, the developer. They provide quality and have a perfect right to charge what they what. I’m just questioning if I want to pay their price. Of course I can simply continue on with version 7 and forget about upgrading. Nobody is holding a gun to my head and forcing me.
Oh, I like the new features, which include tabbed (sort of) documents and macro capabilities. I love tabbed browsing in Mozilla and Safari and want it in any program that requires me to work with multiple windows, which certainly applies to web site editing.
The old Mac game of juggling stacked windows is so awkward and inefficient. Windows html editors have had tabbed documents for years. It is more than time that Mac developers caught up. Bare Bones finally has. But it’s not alone. By now even the free Smultron has tabbed pages.
My dilemma is further compounded by the fact that BBEdit’s multi-file search and replace function is now free. Bare Bones has released its formerly $49 TextWrangle program for no charge. And TextWrangler has all of BBEdit’s search functionality including its excellent regular expression (grep) capability. It has tabbed documents too.
Regular expressions allow you to search for and selectively replace text patterns, not just exact letter matches. Regular expressions are geeky, picky, tricky and incredibly powerful. BBEdit’s ability to search entire folders and replace selected text has saved me many, many hour of work on many occasions. It also is much more accurate than searching by eye, which always misses something.
If BBEdit’s search features were all that I need I could just drop it. It was once the only program that handled them with any degree of completeness. No longer. Others have caught up. I ask myself what other features BBEdit has that I’ve become used to using. Or more accurately does it have something that I need that no other editor can offer.
TextMate, which at $50 for the full version, is the same price as the BBEdit upgrade, is one compelling reason to not upgrade. skEdit, a nice pro level web editor for $20 is an even more compelling one. While neither exactly matches BBEdit’s feature set, they each offer features that BBEdit doesn’t.
- BBEdit pros:
- Rich feature set
- Rich preferences set
- Excellent HTML tools
- Services aware
- A stable, reliable company makes it
- Most FTP programs support it as an external editor
- Integrates with Dreamweaver
- I already know it
- Cons:
- Expensive
- Complex
- Lacks some features I like
My personal jury is still out. For the time being, I will continue to use that last version of BBEdit and will try out demos of other promising editors.
Resources:
Bare Bones Software
7 Comments Add your own
1. Chris | April 4th, 2006 at 9:04 am
What features from BBEdit do you find missing in TextMate? (I know about some, but there are replacements for some that you may not be aware of; also, if it’s something MacroMates isn’t aware of, I’m sure it could be added.)
2. michael | April 4th, 2006 at 9:37 am
Hi Chris.
It’s not a matter of missing features. TextMate is a great editor. No argument. My point is that BBEdit used to be alone as the only polished professional programmers editor. (Alpha is powerful but verrrry clunky) With their monopoly position, Bare Bones could charge as much as the market would bear. With TextMate as competition, I’m hoping that the price of BBEdit drops to something in the same ball park.
I have 10 years of using BBEdit; anything else just isn’t the same, whether it has comparable features or not. My preference for BBEdit could be just laziness on my part, not taking the time to relearn. Or it could be that different people produce best with different work flows. Or maybe I just like to bitch. ;-)
3. Fred Gans | April 4th, 2006 at 11:04 am
There’s no comparision between the AppleScript support of BBEdit and TextMate. BBEdit not only has an extensive dictionary, it is also recordable! My company recently adapted thousands of pages to work with the new IE7 plugin requirements, by using BBEdit and AppleScript. It’s worth the price difference alone.
4. michael | April 4th, 2006 at 11:19 am
Your point is well taken Fred,
The last time I had to do an extensive AppleScripted project I used Tex-Edit Plus. I didn’t even think of BBEdit.
5. Margo Esquandolas | April 4th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
I agree with Fred, and would add that if my project involves other apps, I’m as likely as not to use Automator instead… or, if no other apps maybe just TextFactory inside BBEdit… but no matter how sliced BBEdit’s automation makes it cheap at twice the price.
If you just use the grep, then maybe you are a TextWrangler person. There are several things I didn’t know would save me so much time until BBEdit put them in, so there’s the “staying on top of things” part that I use but isn’t a feature. I use the HTML palette, the glossaries, the preview server particularly for heavily templated stuff, the scripting (in all three forms)…
for a tool I use every day, slicing up two digits is slicing things too thin… plus there’s real documentation… besides, there are other price points, about 1/2 price for the paying-attention discount crossgrade price, or about 1/4 price for students/teachers.
6. Brian | April 5th, 2006 at 5:57 am
I am sticking with version 7 until something really compelling comes along. I think they took their cue from Apple on this–charging full price for an upgrade, that is.
7. Mac Web Design » Ma&hellip | September 9th, 2006 at 9:57 am
[...] A while ago I wondered publicaly if BBEdit was worth the high price of $200 that Bare Bones Software was charging. It appears that I was not alone in my thinking. A new version of BBEdit came out this week that not only offers new features but comes with a new lower price tag of $125. The upgrade price dropped too. [...]
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