One example of why BBEdit kicks ass

Published 5 years, 8 months ago in macintosh

Daniela So, tonight, a buddy of mine asks for some help finding an obscure variable in PHPNuke that controls a small piece of how an article submitted by a reader of a PHPNuke powered website is displayed.

PHPNuke is a great engine, but it’s been written piecemeal by the author over time, and sometimes the places that things live don’t make a lot of sense, unless you live inside PHPNuke and understand exactly what is where and why… And the developer does have the tendency to change things from version to version (which is great, as he’s generally cleaning up old code, but it still wears on the mind)…

Anyways, so my friend is a PC guy, and uses Windows XP (because it’s a great OS in his opinion) but we all know that BBEdit is Macintosh only, and there is nothing that really even comes close to the pure power that is BBEdit on Windows.

So, this guy asks me to help him find the variable “_WRITES” because he just can’t find it where he thinks it should be.

So, I downloaded the source code for one of my PHPNuke powered sites (yeah, I know its overkill for most sites, but it was easy to set up) and open a ‘Find’ window in BBEdit and set it up to search multiple files in that downloaded directory and I search for “_WRITES”.

In less than a minute it had searched through 1800 files (text and images, though I could have had it not search the images if I wanted to bother) and it found 36 files with the select “_WRITES” in them. It also displayed in one window the context of what it found, what line it was on, and let me open those files if I wanted to directly from the results pane…

The real beauty of all of this was that in less than I minute I’d solved his issue, and it only took me 3 or 4 steps, and he’d been using XP’s built in ‘find’ menu to search the contents of a directory and he couldn’t find it. He’d spent 3 hours looking for the file manually, and still hadn’t found it when he finally asked me for help.

I didn’t rub in the fact that I’ve been telling him Macs are better than PCs for some things at that particular point in the conversation, but after a few minutes he said “Man, I really wish I had a Macintosh sometimes.”

That’s the power of BBEdit. Apple should really be thanking Bare Bones as much as they can…

11 Responses to “One example of why BBEdit kicks ass”

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1 pete Feb 27th, 2003 at 12:17 am

Well, if you need a good (free/GPL’d) text editor for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, I recommend jEdit.

If you’re a diehard BBEdit fan it might not sway you (though there are a few BBEdit->jEdit switchers out there) but if you want something with a feature set really close to BBEdit, or you don’t have a Mac, check it out.
2 Erik J. Barzeski Feb 27th, 2003 at 12:35 am

And what exactly should Apple be doing to thank BBEdit? I liked the post… until that part.
3 Matt Feb 27th, 2003 at 9:01 am

Topstyle has what sounds like an identical feature. I think that’s the fastest moving editor for PCs right now. Though in my experience Dreamweaver is the best in terms of a web IDE, and as long as you stay out of design view (or just go into it for tedious stuff) you can generally stay quite efficient.
4 Steve Feb 27th, 2003 at 9:33 am

Or you could just open a terminal & type grep ‘WRITES’ * -r and avoid all of the above.??
5 Scott Johnson Feb 27th, 2003 at 10:03 am

Not to bash BBEdit at all (well maybe a bit) but any editor worth a crap on the PC has this. I just did a similar thing with EditPlus the other day to make sense of a large Cold Fusion site.

I’m sure BBEdit has killer features but is multi-file search really it?

Oh and fyi, I used this same thing back in 1990ish w/ Multi-Edit under DOS.
6 kasia Feb 28th, 2003 at 12:22 am

emacs does all that and so much more..
7 jm Mar 3rd, 2003 at 7:44 am

Using Windows Find,

you can search only *.php files for a specific string
8 paul Mar 5th, 2003 at 11:53 pm

This is really more about the power of a command line (or a GUI tool that harnesses that power: BareBones calls it grep, after all) than Mac OS vs The Leading Brand. I added Cygwin to my WIN2k box as soon I started my new job, so all old UNIX shell commands are at my fingertips.

I think it’s interesting that as Windows moves away from letting users work at the command line (has DOS improved since 1985 or so? It doesn’t even have an online manual worthy of the name) while Apple is building their future on UNIX. The argument used to run the other way . . .