I’ve been reading the crap out of the BBEdit manual. All 450 flippin' pages of it. While it’s not quite as comprehensive as the Emacs manual, it does cover all of the surface features and menus that you can encounter in BBEdit, which is a lot. There are whole sections on the different support folders that you can customize BBEdit with, and there are even references to the different Emacs features and commands they support. Which is nice, because it’s certainly nice to not have to abandon all of my learned muscle memory for opening, writing files, searching and line navigation.

I already explored some of BBEdit’s features on my own. However, there is so much more to the tool than just it’s mild-mannered appearance. Like many aged characters, it has accumulated quite a lot of features over the years that all-too-often get buried in lieu of newer and fancier features. Like LSPs and AI Integration. While those are all well and good, I tend to appreciate the older and more subtle tools that make the difference between a good tool and a great tool. For instance: BBEdit has the ability to find and replace, like any good text editor does. However, BBEdit’s functionality actually leans heavily on Grep, and many of the internal semantics from the command-line tool are applicable in BBEdit. This makes it easy to go from CLI to GUI without having to relearn tools.

I’m finding that BBEdit, while not as directly extensible as Emacs, it’s also a lot easier to pick up and run with. Regardless of your familiarity with other tools from other platforms or the command-line. I wish there were more well-crafted and honed tools like it. There are so many tools that seem more flash-in-pan and built for a quick turn around or cash grab.