(I count two others: DragThing and Default Folder). Almost none of the other apps I used in 1997 are on my hard drive today. And not just as a relic of the old times, but as a modern, relevant text editor. Ah, quirky About boxes-another classic Mac feature that survives in BBEdit to this day.)Īll of this would be an insane nostalgia trip were it not for this amazing fact: BBEdit’s still around. I remember being impressed that Stephan was listed in BBEdit’s About box, credited as one of two “princes of insufficient light.” (And if you look closely, you may see your own name in the About box too. I can’t remember exactly when I stopped editing webpages using the text editor inside the Eudora email application, but I’m pretty sure it was my colleague Stephan Somogyi who got me into it. I was introduced to BBEdit somewhere around 1995, while working at MacUser magazine. I’ve used BBEdit to build websites, edit PHP and JavaScript code, and write hundreds of articles. (These days, of course, you can buy a book just about BBEdit, including Grep tutorials I would’ve killed for back in the day.)Īlthough BBEdit was initially conceived of as a tool for programmers, it’s far more flexible than that.
#TEXT EDIT ON A MAC LIKE BBEDIT HOW TO#
In 1997 I bought a book just to teach myself how to use Grep-style regular expressions, and it paid dividends. If you don’t know what Grep is, suffice it to say that it’s the single biggest productivity booster I have experienced in my entire computer-using life. BBEdit used special features of System 7, which for my money was the first major Mac transition-a modern-day Mac user might find System 7 odd, but it would be far more familiar than its predecessor, System 6.0.8.īut what strikes me most about this announcement is that the first public edition of BBEdit already offers two of its most important features-multi-file search and replace and support for Grep pattern-matching. I realize that many Macworld readers were not around 20 years ago, so as someone who was a college student back then who had only recently discovered and embraced the Mac, let me translate. Grep pattern-matching is available for single- or multi-file searches. The size of any file is only limited by the amount of memory available in BBEdit’s partition there is no 32K upper bound.īBEdit offers fast and flexible multi-file search and replace capabilities under System 7, it can also use On Location 2.0 as a searching engine. BBEdit is 32-bit clean, compatible with any Macintosh running system version 6.0 or later, and when running under System 7.0, takes specific advantage of new features to enhance performance and appearance.īBEdit is also very economical with respect to disk and memory usage it will run in a partition as small as 256K.
#TEXT EDIT ON A MAC LIKE BBEDIT FREE#
This is the first public release of BBEdit, which is a free text editor that has been under development and extensive in-house testing for the past two years. on Sunday, April 12, 1992, heralds the arrival of a free text editor: As someone who has written hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of words in Bare Bones Software’s flagship product, let me take this opportunity to praise and reminisce.īBEdit 5.0, from 1998.BBEdit began with a post on the Usenet newsgroup by Rich Siegel, who 20 years later is still the lead developer on the product.
I’m sure there are other apps not published by a gigantic company that have managed to last as long, but I’m not sure that any app has changed with the times and remained as relevant as BBEdit. Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the venerable Mac text-editing app BBEdit.
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