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  1. Stackups
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  4. Text Editor
  5. BBEdit vs TextMate

BBEdit vs TextMate

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

TextMate
TextMate
Stacks121
Followers118
Votes56
BBEdit
BBEdit
Stacks36
Followers34
Votes5

BBEdit vs TextMate: What are the differences?

Introduction

BBEdit and TextMate are both popular text editors used by developers and programmers to write and edit code. While they share some similarities, there are key differences that set them apart. In this article, we will explore these differences in detail.

  1. Price: One of the main differences between BBEdit and TextMate is the price. BBEdit is a commercial software and requires a license that needs to be purchased. On the other hand, TextMate offers a free trial version but also provides the option to purchase a license for additional features and support.

  2. Interface: The interface of BBEdit and TextMate also differs. BBEdit has a more traditional, classic interface with a toolbar, menu bar, and separate sidebar for file browsing. TextMate has a cleaner and minimalistic interface, with a sidebar and text editor taking up the majority of the screen space. It offers a more focused writing experience.

  3. Customizability: BBEdit is known for its extensive customization options. It provides a wide range of customization features, allowing users to tweak the editor to their liking. TextMate, on the other hand, has a more limited set of customization options compared to BBEdit. While users can customize certain aspects of the editor, the options are not as extensive as in BBEdit.

  4. Language Support: Both BBEdit and TextMate support a wide range of programming languages. However, BBEdit has a larger number of built-in language color schemes and syntax highlighting options compared to TextMate. BBEdit also provides more comprehensive language-specific settings and features, making it a better choice for developers working with multiple programming languages.

  5. Workflow Tools: BBEdit offers a wide range of built-in workflow tools and automation options to enhance productivity. It includes features like text manipulation, search and replace, multi-file search, and powerful grep pattern matching. TextMate also provides similar features but with a more streamlined approach. It focuses on simplicity and ease of use, offering a lightweight set of workflow tools compared to BBEdit.

  6. Community and Support: Both BBEdit and TextMate have a strong community of users, with active forums and discussion groups. However, BBEdit has been around for a longer time and has a larger user base, resulting in a more extensive support ecosystem. BBEdit also offers dedicated technical support and regular software updates, ensuring a reliable and well-supported experience for its users.

In summary, BBEdit and TextMate differ in terms of pricing, interface, customizability, language support, workflow tools, and community support. While BBEdit offers a more feature-rich and customizable experience, TextMate focuses on simplicity and a minimalistic interface. The choice between the two depends on the specific needs and preferences of the user.

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Detailed Comparison

TextMate
TextMate
BBEdit
BBEdit

TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.

It has been crafted to serve the needs of writers, Web authors and software developers, and provides an abundance of features for editing, searching, and manipulation of prose, source code, and textual data.

Ability to Search and Replace in a Project;Auto-Indent for Common Actions Like Pasting Text;Auto-Pairing of Brackets and Other Characters;Clipboard History;Column Selections and Column Typing;Completion of Words from Current Document;CSS-like Selectors to Pinpoint the Scope of Actions and Settings;Declarative Language Grammars for Graceful Mixing and Hacking;Dynamic Outline for Working With Multiple Files;Expand Trigger Words to Code Blocks With Tab-able Placeholders;File Tabs when Working With Projects;Foldable Code Blocks;Function Pop-up for Quick Overview and Navigation;Plug-able Through Your Favorite Scripting Language;Recordable Macros With No Programming Required;Regular Expression Search and Replace (grep);Run Shell Commands from Within a Document;Support for Darcs, Perforce, SVK, and Subversion;Support for More Than 50 Languages;Switch Between Files in Projects With a Minimum of Key Strokes;Themable Syntax Highlight Colors;Visual Bookmarks to Jump Between Places in a File;Works As External Editor for (s)ftp Programs;Works Together With Xcode and Can Build Xcode Projects
intelligent interface ; Integrate Smoothly Into Existing Workflows
Statistics
Stacks
121
Stacks
36
Followers
118
Followers
34
Votes
56
Votes
5
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 17
    Syntax highlighting
  • 5
    Javascript
  • 5
    PHP Developer
  • 4
    jQuery developer
  • 4
    Native UI
Pros
  • 1
    Highly extensible (plugins, text filters, etc)
  • 1
    Snippets functionality includes substitutions
  • 1
    Flexible project file management
  • 1
    Support for character encodings and file formats
  • 1
    Superb regex find/replace
Integrations
No integrations available
Git
Git
macOS
macOS

What are some alternatives to TextMate, BBEdit?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Atom

Atom

At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.

Vim

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Notepad++

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Emacs

Emacs

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Brackets

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

Neovim

Neovim

Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.

VSCodium

VSCodium

It is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode.

gedit

gedit

gedit is the GNOME text editor. While aiming at simplicity and ease of use, gedit is a powerful general purpose text editor.

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