I spend a lot of time with my text editor (not going to start a flame war by naming it here!), and I have yet to see any that would be worth $179 to me. Ever. What does BBEdit offer, apart from the fact that Bare Bones software looks like a really cool company, that makes it worth your $179 and isn't found in any other editor?

Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that!

somebody created a carbon version of vim at this site

The only thing in your list I don't know how to do in vim are editing files on ftp servers. but I also have an ftp client, so i'll survive. :)

You're wrong. This isn't sleazy. This is a very nice gesture on BareBones' part. They are helping the EFF by donating money. No matter how they decide to give, the money will come from the same place, sales of their product. They amount they choose to give is up to them and they decided that it would be based on the number of sales in a given period.

How many would, given a $10 discount on BBedit, go and send that $10 to EFF without a thought?

That's even worse! Now you're setting them up as a company that willfully gives money to charties their own customers wouldn't think of supporting! That's not good PR, Mr. Log. Not at all.

There's people that are buying BBedit that won't even know about the promotion.

Again, this is a bad thing! Now you're just having them bleed money with no more benefit than if they had just silently given a check, you know, as if they actually supported the efforts of the EFF. Sorry, but you don't seem to know the first thing about either heartfelt charity or successful PR.

In the shopping cart area, [Small Dog] give an option to match from $10-$200 of a charity donation

With the kicker condition being "up to our set annual level of charitable giving". Notice how that maximum is never disclosed. Notice how the status of being a tax write-off (and for whom) is never discussed. So while they are being more respectable in their methods than Bare Bones is, they are still shading things so they come off looking better than they actually are. Again, that is not the kind of "charity" I was taught to practice, and it should not be the kind of thing anyone tolerates in association with a company. If you're supporting a company not because it does a good job but because it gives you warm fuzzies, you're just contributing to the decline of what should be a free market society.

Are there any BBEdit users that have switched to that from Emacs? If so, what about BBEdit made it a good switch?

I was never a hardcore emacs user, and I suppose if you are one then you shouldn't switch -- the fact that emacs is available on so many more platforms than BBEdit alone is attractive (and that it works fine when accessing a server via SSH).

That said, I did use Emacs quite a bit until I played a bit with BBEdit. I had used BBEdit Lite for some light HTML and PHP scripting, and on someone's suggestion (on the BareBones mailing list), I tried the 24-day trial download.

I was hooked. Not everything was apparent, still I discover new things (I remember when I first found out about the Glossary, which is a handy way of pre-defining commonly used functions and XML tags, and someone has just written a Glossary to generate any function call in the PHP language), but it is an extremely elegant and easy to work in text editor. Note that I say "easy to work in" -- what I mean by this is that you can just jump in and start coding. As you go along you can amplify your experience, but things just seem to work in BBEdit better than in any other editor I've used.

Sadly, I have to use Win2k at work, but have found that jEdit is a nice free text editor to work with and, although not quite a match for BBEdit (for instance, being able to script so much functionality in BBEdit from Perl, Python, or Applescript is nice), is a nice environment.

I will start with the disclaimer that BBEdit, vi, and UltraEdit (on Windows) are basically the only text editors I've ever used. [OK, I've also used SimpleText and probably a few others, but none that anyone takes seriously as a text editor. That said...

BBEdit is a great editor, and has a great Mac UI. What I find invaluable is:

• Regular Expression Search and Replace
• Keyword and comment highlighting for almost every programming and scripting language.
• Its overall UI performance has always been great.
• Ability to edit files on remote FTP servers.
• Ability to open files from the command line ("bbedit *.java").
• Ability to add or remove indent tabs for each line in a block of text in one fell swoop.
• Built-in perl function reference.
• Ability to read files with any line break style (DOS, UNIX, Mac), and to change the line break style on any file.
• drag-and-drop text editing

In addition, BBEdit 7 adds CVS integration, so I'm still waiting for my copy in the mail.

If I didn't use BBEdit, I'd probably use BBEdit Lite as a text editor, which is great even though it doesn't have all the features.

I'd certainly suggest that you join EFF directly. If nothing else, BBEdit is a respected company which is endorsing the EFF, generating discussion, and (hopefully) encouraging more direct donations. I figure this is good publicity for the EFF even if they don't get a single cent via BBEdit.

Of course if the Aggressive Serial Spammers and HOLlywood Executives Society were to endorse the EFF, this might cause me to rething my contributions.

Let's not forget the comments from EFF:

Ren Bucholz, EFF Activist, said, "We are thrilled that Bare Bones is supporting the EFF. We've been using BBEdit for years, and it's terrific to know that they make great products *and* care about civil liberties."

I also spend most of my computing day in my text editor. After switching to Mac (from Unix & Unix-likes) and hanging out on the BBEdit mailing list for a time, I've come to the conclusion that BBEdit's strength over the Big 2 is it's Macness. It's for Mac users, by Mac users. The Macintosh way is important for BBEdit; ease of use, and ease of learning, is given an important status.

That said, Larry Wall pointed out something very interesting. I think it's true. Humans will, in the long run, optimize for expressiveness over ease of learning or use. Our natural languages are horribly (& seemingly needlessly) complex and hard to learn. But gosh darn it, every one of us has learned at least one. In fact, we also learned how to read at least one language! (and smileys to go along, too :)

If you are really serious about editing text. I'd recommend either of the Big 2. (I'm a vi-addict, but I acnowledge that actually, long-long term, Emacs is very possibly the way to go. Of course, this means you'll be customizing your Emacs with Lisp code goodness, not just using the defaults, and unfortunately that's the state of the art for text editing in 2002. As far as I know.) Current versions of Emacs don't really interface with the rest of the `Mac experience' too well, and it still takes too long to load for my tastes (in farness, it seems to load faster than BBEdit). I feel that vi, and especially vim, are absolutely fantastic, and can take you 95% or more of the way to full Emacs-power. BBEdit is grand for powerful text editing with a shallow (but not particularly short) learning curve. You can be productive now!

If you already have a powerful editor, (and there are more than Emacs, vi, & BBEdit) then BBEdit is probably not going to be much better for you unless you're a fan of the `Mac experience'. If you just want to write and debug your code, then you're not going to be happier with BBEdit. And if you know that your long-term expressiveness in editing text is of higher import than being able to get that web page now, then it is my opinion that you can do better than BBEdit.

Being a bad radio listener and hearing public radio without donating, (I will as soon as I have a good-paying job! Honest!) this sort of donation is actually the norm for corporate donating with small companies. Often, it's done either as

• Donate 'part of our profits' as BareBones has done,
• Donate products or services either directly or to be auctioned off,
• Donation matching or Challenge grants, whereby they will donate based on what the community donates (Either dollar for dollar to a limit or as a whole)

The reasons this is used instead of a straight lump sum donation? They all equate to a tax rideoff, good PR, and a warm fuzzy feeling no matter how they're cut. But unless you're Bill Gates, there's good reasons for avoiding the lump sum.

First, it's to defray the cost and extend the mileage of the dollar value of the donation. Unfortunately, a company that blindly gives out money won't be able to do that for long, and these are ways to give more, longer. In the first case, the company would take a minor hit on the margin, and the user would not have to feel like they're paying more than they would otherwise. How many would, given a $10 discount on BBedit, go and send that $10 to EFF without a thought? There's people that are buying BBedit that won't even know about the promotion.

In the second case, the cost of the item is lower than the retail value, so while it'd be costing a donator $30 in parts cost, the charity is getting a $60 value. A win-win situation that a lump-sum could not give.

In the third case, the company is effectively setting up a situation where the charity can say, "Every $1 you donate means $2 towards the cause." In fact, all three, either by purchase from company, auction bid to charity, or matched donation have an element of community involvement, which is more essential to a charity than any company hand-out. It gets the foot in the door.

And last, also tying in with community involvement, it serves as a signal to amplify. Barebones could be giving that $5000 to any random charity with no indication of how valuable and worthy the charity is. By requiring some actions on the part of the people, they can give the full amount to those where the public feels have the most worth, and rededicate the donations otherwise. While it might sound sleezy, the intentions can be quite far from it.

I must mention this site because I remembered it while researching the urls above. Small Dog Electronics. They used to sell used macs, now they sell new, and what I have purchased from them have been great. The reason I must mention them here, however, is because of their Charity program. In the shopping cart area, they give an option to match from $10-$200 of a charity donation (You choose from 8 groups in increments of $10).

This means that for every $10 you donate, they take a more-than $10 hit (They cover the money the credit card takes out) with no additional strings. I have to say, this takes a lot of guts -- or should I say Puppy Power?

Oh! It looks like you're about to finish up that purchase of a CD-ROM and scanner. Say, while you're at it, take a look at a great way to cost us a lot of money!

No matter how they decide to give, the money will come from the same place, sales of their product.

And perhaps you really do think all money is equal in that manner, but I happen to think it's sleezy when a company forwards a "you'll get yours when we get ours" campaign. I thought so when so many were doing such things post-9/11 and I still think so. The whole point of charity (as I was taught it) is that it was meant to be a selfless gesture. Engaging in the type of promotion shown here does not strike me as selfless at all. You can disagree or mod me "Troll" all you want, but that won't change the fact that of all the ways they could have chosen to give, they picked one that mandanted they get first.