Several years ago I tried to switch to Linux. BBEdit prevented me from completing the switch. That said, I did a pretty exhaustive audit of the Linux editors. vi tends to be everyone's favorite, no joke. I also found micro, a pretty cool cli editor.
As far as GUI's go, VS Code kind of rules. It seems like everyone loves it. It's an Electron app (which means it's a web browser without guard rails) so it's cross platform. I can't stand editing code using a web browser textbox so I can't stand VS Code. All of the keyboard shortcuts are wrong (for a Mac power user). I did force myself to use VS Code for one project and I got used to it I guess but once I was done with the project I ran from VS Code like the plague. I think the people who love it don't use keyboard shortcuts and they grew up with web browsers and don't have anything against textboxes. I grew up using computers long before the textbox existed, and when they showed up in Netscape I never cared for them. I think all of the other text editors are based on Scintilla (https://www.scintilla.org/). A few editors that use Scintilla include SciTE, Geany, TextAdept, and ZeroBrane Studio. I think all of those are available on macOS too. They are all scripted with Lua (my fav language) and have some really cool features. Everyone's favorite Windows editor, Notepad++, is even based off of Scintilla. There's a full list of editors based on Scintilla here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintilla_(software). You basically have the CLI editors: vi, emacs, and then pico and it's descendants with micro being the latest and includes most modern editor features. Then you've got the Scintilla editors. Then you've got all the Electron editors, which includes VS Code, Atom (the OG), Cursor, and all the other AI first editors. Then you've got the old school GUI's, which includes BBEdit, Sublime Text, and many others that I don't hear about anymore like TextMate. Of course, there's the office apps too. They technically edit text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_text_editors I've heard whispers that Zed might be good. It is being written by some of the people who contributed to Atom. And thank heavens it's not Electron. I haven't tried it though but I just opened it and maybe I'll use it by the end of today lol. In fact, I just tried a few things and the first thing I notice is the menu where a keyboard shortcut lives in doesn't flash when you press the keyboard shortcut. It's a really small detail, but flashing the menu makes it so easy to learn keyboard shortcuts. Maybe they'll add the feature, I hope they do. But if they never do it goes to show the devs don't know or care about helping average users become power users. I think flashing the menu when a keyboard shortcut is typed goes back to the original Mac and all the philosophies that built it. Because Windows was a bad photocopy of macOS, it lacked the philosophies and so people who grew up using it don't even know that UIs can be a philosophical thing. But the great computer scientists that created this GUI world we all work in, like Larry Tesler and Alan Kay, were full to the brim of philosophies and most of those were written down in Apple's original HIG. I think that even Apple has forgotten these original philosophies. https://uxdesign.cc/did-apple-abandoned-its-own-design-heuristics-accessibility-principles-2d616ed7ace5 All that said, nothing I've tried comes close to the functionality of BBEdit. Besides communication apps and iTerm2, BBEdit is my main app, so, yeah, I didn't switch to Linux. I don't use half of the functionality of BBEdit but I got addicted to some features that don't exist anywhere else. When I say addicted, I would probably be 10x slower without these features. IDK. BBEdit allowed me to learn some really weird editing habits like copying the file I'm editing into a new untitled document and comparing the front 2 docs so I can instantly see what I've changed and only updating the copy once I've finished the feature or fixed the bug (kind of like a video game checkpoint). Yeah, I'm kind of weird I guess. James Reynolds magnusviri.com > On Jul 22, 2025, at 11:12, Mark C. <[email protected]> wrote: > > After many years I finally bought a license for BBedit that I use with the > Macbook at work. > At home I use an old linux box running Lubuntu. I'm trying different editors > to try and get some of that sweet BBedit functionality at home. > > I was reading an article about trying to replace BBedit with Sublime Text, > and it noted the areas where Sublime falls short: > > • “Process Duplicate Lines…” > • Eliminate duplicate lines in a file. This is often useful after > performing a series of text transformations. > • “Process Lines Containing…” > • Delete (or preserve) all lines containing a subexpression. Exactly like > the grep command-line tool. > I'm wondering if there is an editor for Linux that allows me to "process > lines containing" > > I guess it's something I could figure out with SED and AI. > > Thanks > > > -- > This is the BBEdit Talk public discussion group. If you have a feature > request or believe that the application isn't working correctly, please email > "[email protected]" rather than posting here. Follow @bbedit on Mastodon: > <https://mastodon.social/@bbedit> > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "BBEdit Talk" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bbedit/1dd1f028-e6e9-4877-ae6c-2827dfff0a94n%40googlegroups.com. -- This is the BBEdit Talk public discussion group. If you have a feature request or believe that the application isn't working correctly, please email "[email protected]" rather than posting here. Follow @bbedit on Mastodon: <https://mastodon.social/@bbedit> --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BBEdit Talk" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bbedit/0B4B9644-E9F6-4C20-B90F-1EB46D3E69C8%40gmail.com.
