I’ve been a hard core BBEdit user since BBEdit 6 (way back before MacOSX). It’s a great text editor, and has many awesome features. I’ve actually stuck at BBEdit 7, since the Big New Features in BBEdit 8 weren’t that big to me, and I couldn’t justify allocating budget for the upgrade license.
I’ve also dabbled with SubEthaEdit, but only seriously as a collaboration tool, never for serious text editing on my own.
However, I was just using it to edit some files, and it’s really nice as a standalone editor! It’s got just about everything I like about BBEdit, has a great UI, the collaboration stuff, and it’s free for non-commercial uses.
The command line tool works nicely (without spewing up extra untitled documents if the app isn’t running when a document is opened via the command line tool), and integrates as a standard EDITOR, so I can use it for subversion commit messages. It’s got syntax colouring for any language I care about, which is nice.
The only thing I’m left wanting for with SubEthaEdit is code reformating. BBEdit has a great tool for reformatting HTML (and XML), and that’s invaluable when writing that. It’s also handy to be able to clean up the formatting on a chunk of java code, so the curly brackets all line up nicely so I can follow flow more easily. I suppose a separate reformatting tool would work fine, especially if it’s callable from within SubEthaEdit.
I’m going to try switching to SubEthaEdit as my primary editor for a while to see if it works as well as BBEdit in practice. I may even set XCode to open files for editing in SubEthaEdit (although XCode has a nice – but not perfect – code reformatter built in).
Now, if only I could find an efficient, well designed editor like SubEthaEdit, with the powerful code cleaning/formatting of JEdit…
Update: Holy. Crap. Check out the demo movie of “block editing” – this could come in extremely handy!
Update: Well… One day with SEE, and I’m still pretty happy with it. I keep catching my reflexive command+option+shift+f to reformat html, but that’s not fatal… Besides, I’m supposed to be off for the week, so I should be spending less time reformatting HTML anyway 
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice article. I, like you, have been using BBEdit for a long time, mainly at work. I am currently a student and looking to get personal copies of most of the software I use at work. I was a bit surprised to find that BBEdit’s educational discounts aren’t so great, which is making me think about switching to SubEthaEdit.
And again, like you, the most important feature for me is being able to re-format text. (I took me a few days to get my Source Profile file just right!
)
Anyway, I’d like to hear more about your SubEthaEdit experiences, and if I figure out my own solutions I’d gladly share them with you.
Take care, and maybe I’ll see you around at Peet’s or something.
Follow up:
This free services package does a nice job of cleaning up your code, even though it is not as customizable as BBEdit’s ability to read a Source Format file:
http://www.pixelfreak.net/tidy_service/
If you spend some time tweaking the configuration file, you might find it helpful.
Now if I can only search and replace multiple files…
Ross, thanks for the link to the Tidy Service! It doesn’t do exactly what I have in mind, but gets me much closer… It doesn’t do the re-indenting, but handles cleaning up XHTML quite nicely. I’ve added it to both of my systems.
Tidy Service can auto-indent your HTML. Create a file in your home directory called TidyService.conf and add the following configuration options.
indent: yes
indent-spaces: 2
For detailed instructions, look at the read me file for Tidy Service and the quick reference page for HTML Tidy.
http://www.pixelfreak.net/tidy_service/readme.html
http://tidy.sourceforge.net/docs/quickref.html
Sweet! Thanks for the tip, Scott!
[...] 17;s ability to handle proper regex… UPDATE: As was pointed out in the comments for another SEE-related post, there is a service called “Tidy Service that provides [...]