BBEdit – The Text Editor for Processing Words – Updated

I wrote the following back in 2005, and I felt it needed updating. I use BBEdit regularly, for more and more writing tasks, and I feel it’s one of the best tools on the Mac platform. While I don’t write much code, much of my writing includes code, such as HTML tags, so BBEdit makes it easy to deal with ordinary text and code together. Read on…

Like many writers, I perform a variety of tasks that involve producing and processing words. For some of these tasks, I am free to choose the tool of my choice, whereas others have external constraints that require me to use a specific word processor. And that specific program is Microsoft Word. But many tasks allow me to choose the tool I want to use. BBEdit, from Bare Bones Software, is becoming the text editor I turn to most often when I have only text to process.

When writing computer books, Word is the de facto standard: while you might be able to use Unix/Linux tools with certain publishers, most of the books I’ve penned are built on Word templates, which contain specific styles set up by the publishers so they can easily transfer the text into their page-layout programs. In addition to these styles, Word is the best tool for tracking changes and comments, as well as passing texts through the complex review process that computer books undergo.The same used to be true for articles I write for Macworld magazine. Macworld recently shifted from Word templates to a tag-based system, which allows me to write in any text editor. Word is still the standard for tracking changes, comments and queries. (How I wish there were a text editor that could handle change tracking and comments the way Word does…)

But what about other texts, such as this one? Word is certainly a good choice, since it processes words, but it is far from the only one. Starting with Apple’s TextEdit, included with Mac OS X, writers have an astounding range of choice, with dozens of text editors available. One such program I use is Smultron, Peter Borg’s free text editor. But one can also use the nano editor accessible from the command line in Terminal, as well as vi and emacs; or any of the other freeware, shareware or commercial text editors to the reigning king of such tools, BBEdit.

Most wordsmiths don’t even look at a program like BBEdit (or its little brother Text Wrangler) because this kind of tool is not really designed for them. Or so it seems… BBEdit is the text editor of choice for anyone coding on Mac OS X. Whether you design web pages in HTML, code java or C++, or write AppleScripts or shell scripts, BBEdit has tools to help you work more efficiently.

I don’t do HTML, aside from the tags that I need to enter in articles on my blog and the tweaking of PHP and CSS files for this site, but I do use Terminal and write the occasional shell script. BBEdit’s tools for these tasks – a built-in file browser, FTP browser, shell worksheets, syntax coloring, glossaries and much more – make it the optimal tool. It is quite simply the best and most powerful program for working with any kind of code.

Yet in recent times, I have been turning to BBEdit to write other texts as well. I don’t need Word’s bells and whistles when writing simple articles; I don’t need headers and footers; indices or tables of contents; nor do I need all the fancy formatting options available. What I do need is a program that is fast, stable, responsive, and that has a handful of basic features. For writing like this, I need to be able to set the font and size I want to view my text, to save my aging eyes. I need to be able to count words; BBEdit does this, but I kind of like Word’s live word count, which lets me see at a glance where I am, or how much I need to trim, when I’m working with a limit. I need drag and drop and spell check, and BBEdit gives me both of these.

Last but certainly not least, BBEdit is the most powerful text editor for finding and replacing text. With its grep function, you can find any text, anywhere in any number of documents (even a folder full of text files), and change it to whatever you want. In addition, BBEdit 8, just released, has a Text Factory feature, which lets you save series of text transformations to apply over and over to different files or groups of files.

So, what’s missing in BBEdit that would make it my nearly full-time text processor? Well, that live word count is pretty nifty; and the ability to save files in RTF format, which would allow me to use bold, italic and underline in my texts, would be a plus; and, of course, change tracking and comments. But the advantage of having a fast, lean, powerful text processor outweighs those minor gripes. Sometimes it’s just easier to write when you’re not distracted by Word’s automatic this and that, correcting things you didn’t want corrected, or all the toolbars and dialogs.

So, if you write, you owe it to yourself to check out BBEdit or the free TextWrangler, its little brother. You might find that one of these tools gives you the power you need and the flexibility, without the constraints of that big, bulky Word that you’ve been using for a long time.