It Kinda Does Suck, Sorry

Try as I might, I just can’t get into “BBEdit”:, supposedly the king-hell text editor for the Mac. It’s certainly not that the app lacks for features; there’s hardly a damn thing it doesn’t do, or couldn’t be scripted to do. It’s just that despite being “Mac OS X native!” BBEdit feels like a Classic application: ugly, unrefined, just barely taking advantage of the benefits of Cocoa. I can see how that wouldn’t bother anyone who has used it for years, but I left the Mac around early OS 9 for Linux, and have a lack of allegiance bordering on loathing for anything from the Classic era.

So, despite wishing for a few of BBEdit’s features, I use SubEthaEdit for my daily text editing, ignoring its powerful collaborative features and just using it as the damn fine straightforward text editor it is.

As a Mac-related aside, Rhapsody in Yellow is an incredible history/opinion piece on Apple’s attempts to modernize their developer environment and operating systems, where they’ve been and where they should be going in one man’s view. Whether you agree with his idea that Apple should be moving more towards (back towards?) cross-platform compatibility, there’s plenty of juicy info in there.

The piece left me a little depressed about Apple’s overall standing in the development market, but I’m lucky enough to be one of the developers he mentions that can develop relatively platform-independent software on my Mac even though most of my users are on Windows and other platforms. I’ve come to love OS X so much that I often wonder if I’d be as passionate about working in/with technology if I didn’t have such a gorgeous working environment; OS X and the hardware it elegantly runs on is, for me, the equivalent of a really nice office I get to come to every day. If Apple and OS X slid into the sea tomorrow I guess I’d go back to running Gentoo on a nice-ish workhorse x86 laptop, probably a Fujitsu LifeBook S7000 or a ThinkPad of some sort, but I wouldn’t be happy about it.