BBEdit is a text manipulation tool not just an editor.

I still can't believe they charge $125 for this. I'm a recent mac convert, and have been using UltraEdit 32 (Win) for about 8 years. It's an amazing app, and my biggest regret in leaving windows. Ok, it's my only regret. It's THAT good. And the price recently went up from $35 to $50.
This is more than double that, but I've used the demo, and it's DEFINITELY not more than twice as good.

Flame me for trying to put a price on productivity, but from my perspective, which I just presented, there is enough evidence for me to call this grossly overpriced.

I've been using BBEdit since the late 90s and I've yet to find a text editor that's more capable, faster, or more reliable. For an application that I spend 80% of my computer time in, BBEdit is well worth the money.

That said, all the attention TextMate has been getting recently convinced me to give it a try for a few weeks. TextMate has some nice features and seems to be a very capable editor, but I still prefer BBEdit, primarily for its greater feature set and more intuitive interface.

For example, I find BBEdit's Document Drawer and Navigation Bar to be better thought-out and more scalable than TextMate's tabs and project drawer. BBEdit's code folding is also more flexible and efficient. It also has more capable search & replace, a more useful function menu, a more complete marker implementation (i.e. bookmarks), more reliable file state preservation, a more Mac-like undo functionality, etc. That's not to say BBEdit is perfect, but in my opinion, it's still the best text editor available on the Mac.

you might think it's crazy to spend over $100 on a TEXT editor, of all things, but BBEdit is worth every penny to anyone who writes code, writes websites, or has to process a lot of text files. If you don't need the heavy lifting, then TextWrangler is free and very very good. But BBEdit is better, so when you find you need it, get it. You won't regret it. And the move from TW will be totally painless.

Great little app. You can get others that do the same for free, but this has a very powerful set of tools in it (eg ordering list, completing tags, spellcheck, find-replace, css validator etc etc

I have been moving over to TextMate recently as it has some nce new features still missing from BBEdit and has a much nicer look and feel more in keeping with the OS. But secretly I hope the next version of BBEdit kicks it's ass, as I have always loved it since I started developing using way back in vewrsion 4.6 I think it was.

Brilliant Applescript support, also look at http://c-command.com/bbautocomplete/ for a free addon

REALLY GOOD HINT: READ THIS TRUST ME

Sorry for the caps, but this is good. TextWrangler is the free version of BBEdit. If you download it, register, and use it for a little while, you get a discount code for the full version of BBEdit. Price goes from $200 to $100.

If you cant' afford it then beg, borrow, or ........ it. If you do any sort of scripting/programming on your mac, you need this app.

Excellent application, but far too expensive.