BBEdit

by Bare Bones Software

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Current version10.1 Last release25/10/2011

When you spend a lot of time coding and writing markup, your choice of text editor has a direct impact on your overall productivity. That's why it makes sense to put some thought into your choice of editing software before making a long-term commitment to a single program. On the Mac OS X platform, BBEdit is one of the most popular text editors used by web developers and coders today. The latest edition of BBEdit, version 10.1, kicks things up a notch.

Features
For nearly 20 years, BBEdit by Bare Bones Software has been the gold standard for Mac-based text editors. The revamped version 10.1 claims to bring over 100 improvements to the table. They offer the standard code editor fare such as code completion, HTML and CSS markup templates for easier reading, and snippet support. In addition, BBEdit also features glossaries for Unix, Perl, and AppleScript, FTP and SFTP support, and advanced file search functionality. All of this is wrapped in BBEdit's highly polished and intuitive UI.

Pros and Cons
With so many things going for it, it's tough to find fault with Bare Bones' BBEdit. It's affordable, fast, reliable, feature-rich, and stacks up quite well against far more expensive text editors. It's also got multi-window support by default, as well as the ability to work with files inside of zipped folders without extracting them first. The only real drawbacks are the lack of CSS syntax checking and instant file search. Outside of that, BBEdit offers a pretty complete package.

Word On The Street
Comparing favorably with alternatives such as Sublime Text 2, Espresso, Xcode, Coda, and TextMate, BBEdit receives consistently favorable reviews from professional web developers and web designers alike. Despite its many features and capabilities, BBEdit is laid out so that it doesn't get in the way of the user. There's plenty of functionality there to use if you need it, but you're not forced to navigate a million incomprehensible drop-down menus to find what you're looking for.

Final Thoughts
If you need a powerful, versatile, and easy-to-use text editor for writing code and crafting web pages on your Mac, BBEdit is arguably the best program available. It's relatively inexpensive, comes with terrific support, and offers more features than nearly any other text editor specifically designed for Macs. If you're not sold on BBEdit, they offer a free trial so you can test the waters before you jump in. Once you've used BBEdit, you'll never want to use another editor.