I love BBEdit, but it has one limitation that drives me batty: it has far fewer syntax highlighting scopes than many other editors. It’s simply not possible to make it as pretty and color as others, and that’s something I personally value. I have to look at a code editor all day, and I want it to look snazzy.

I know it’s minor and petty, but it stills grates on me every time I fire it up.

Yeah, it‘s from another era. The concept of beatiful code came up with TextMate, Sublime, VS Code. And old editors tried to catch up, but didn’t really make it.

But I have a nice-ish theme in BBEdit for markdown, and I‘m ok. I don’t code in it. Just plain text editing, using it as a scratchpad. It’s open all day long.

That’s totally reasonable. And I know that’s a goofy hill to die on, when it’s otherwise architecturally beautiful.

But darn it, even if it turned out to be my perfect car, I don’t want to drive an Aztek.

Because it’s too complicated to learn many complicated tools well instead of tweaking Sublime to do the search and replace across files, even if it’s a bit worse. Also you’re not limited to Macs