I read about BBEdit on HN a few months ago and realized it has one use-case where it excels: text transformation and regex search/replace across files. When it comes to this, no other editor I know can hold water: neither Sublime, nor VS Code, nor Vim. And forget about Emacs, as regexes need to be awkwardly double or triple backslashed.
Text transformations can be done via regex, predefined functions, or any scripting language, where the scripts will be listed in the menu.
Regex search/replace has a history of used patterns, so you can reuse them.
All in all, it is a very lightweight editor with excellent text transformation features that no other editor can offer.
I use VS Code for coding, Emacs as a Lisp machine and its macro recorder for repetitive tasks, and BBEdit for all other text transformation tasks.
This is why BBEdit is still my absolute go-to as a technical writer. I’ve found other editors that are prettier, but it’s just so darn good at text manipulation it’s hard to believe.
While I drifted away from BBEdit for coding a while ago, BBEdit 14’s LSP support has pulled me back to some degree. I put together a decent Elixir package for it and, to my own mild surprise, like it more than Panic Nova or Doom Emacs. (Nova has tremendous potential, but it feels like it’s still tripping over its own shoelaces a little too often.)
Notepad++ has a decent interface for that, I assume BBEdit did it first.
I'd be surprised if vim couldn't do it as a command. After doing a search, what did surprise me was Vim having it's own Fandom wiki. Maybe extreme Vim commanding will be the next popular livestreaming topic.
That was the killer BBEdit feature for me, back when I was building my first static web sites. Making precise global layout changes without using a web template system felt like magic.
Text transformations can be done via regex, predefined functions, or any scripting language, where the scripts will be listed in the menu.
Regex search/replace has a history of used patterns, so you can reuse them.
All in all, it is a very lightweight editor with excellent text transformation features that no other editor can offer.
I use VS Code for coding, Emacs as a Lisp machine and its macro recorder for repetitive tasks, and BBEdit for all other text transformation tasks.