Warning: long! If you don't live in your text editor all day, you probably won't find most of my comments interesting; save yourself some time and just skip over this!

I've been looking forward to the next BBEdit update for quite some time. I thought BBEdit 8 was a great new version, and it finally got me to upgrade from BBEdit 6.5 (I found version 7 very disappointing and didn't go for it). I've been using this program for 8 or 9 years now, and until recently, there was really no competition for it. Other editors existed, of course, but to me none of them even came close.

One day, along comes this new one called TextMate. I tried out version 1.0, and thought "well, they did a lot of nice things, but there's no way I could drop BBEdit for this." It was simply missing too much of the functionality that I rely on. But the developers worked hard on it, and a little community formed around it, and when I came back and had another look at it, around version 1.5, a lot had changed, and it started to look *very* good. While still missing a lot of BBEdit's features, they had added some truly innovative ideas.

What really caught my attention were the editable bundles, with which you can define snippets, language style conventions, scopes & contexts, and a lot more. This feature alone leapfrogs BBEdit in a very significant way, promising to save me enormous amounts of time. BBEdit's "Glossary" feature absolutely pales in comparison. It's like comparing a tricycle to a motorcycle. Sure...they're both cycles, but don't plan on winning any races -- or even just getting somewhere much faster than walking -- with the Glossary.

Okay, let's shift our focus back to BBEdit, since that's what I'm supposed to be commenting on. Here we have the new BBEdit 8.5 upgrade. It's clear right off the bat that Barebones has been paying attention to what people are saying, and took a very close look at TextMate. We've now got text folding -- one of TextMate's coolest features -- and BBEdit has done it quite nicely. Each program handles certain aspects of this better than the other, but on the whole they're about even.

Another nice new display-related feature in 8.5 is the ability to maintain indent levels for soft-wrapped lines; this is very helpful when reading code and text with markup. I requested this feature several years ago, and I'm sure many others have been asking for it too. Much appreciated.

Barebones always provides a detailed list of changes, even for minor updates; I very much appreciate these, and I always read the whole thing. The full list for 8.5 is quite large indeed, and I found myself nodding and giving a mental thumbs-up repeatedly as I made my way through this list. I definitely agree with most of the changes, and it's clear that BBEdit is still growing in a positive direction.

So, now to the crux of the matter. The "bundles" in TextMate still hold a very significant advantage over BBEdit. Clearly Barebones realized how important this feature is, and how antiquated the Glossary was, as it got a new name, a bit of a facelift, and is now context-sensitive to the current language. I'm glad to see this feature is getting some attention, but in reality, the usefulness of it hasn't really progressed that much yet. You could say it's been upgraded from tricycle to a bicycle, but it's still left in the dust. While this feature might get turbo-charged in BBEdit 9, that's a big "maybe" that looms somewhere off in the future, and in the meantime, I'm now trying to decide whether to jump ship to TextMate or ride it out until the next major BBEdit upgrade.

This is a huge decision for me, as this is probably the most important tool I use for my job. I work with HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL. I'm so used to BBEdit, and I'm interested in all the new goodies in BBEdit 8.5, but for the first time, there's another program out there that I suspect might be quite a bit more powerful for the kinds of work I do. It's going to be a project just to compare the latest versions of these programs, point-by-point, and see which one comes out ahead. I've started doing this, and I plan to share my findings in a thorough review. Until then, I thought I'd at least share some of my thought process on this so far, for the handful of users out there that might find it relevant.