While I'm using VSCode a lot more these days, I still like BBEdit a lot. It's a Mac-native programmer's text editor that manages to remain performant on large files.

I think part of the problem is that in order to make a good programmer's text editor, you need a large community of people who're able and willing to make good plugins for it, and any text editor with a userbase smaller than "half of all linux nerds" isn't going to have enough engineer hours put into all its per-language tooling. Visual Studio Code manages to attract enough developer attention to get people to work on compatible language servers and whatnot, but the granddaddy of all Mac text editors can't attract that much attention.

Plus, I get a _lot_ of mileage out of multiple cursors. Way more than I'd have expected ten years ago.

This is a frustratingly hard assertion to defend, at least in very short form, but I've been a technical writer for years now, mostly working in Markdown, and I keep coming back to BBEdit. It's not one huge thing that it does better for me than other editors, it's a collection of little things: every editor has some kind of "open file by name via fuzzy searching" command, for instance, but BBEdit lets me open multiple matching files at once. (Yes, this turns out to be immensely useful for me.) It keeps a search and replace history and lets me save patterns with a meaningful name. Its "multi-file search" window isn't as fast as some other editors, but it's insanely targetable, and again, lets me save my criteria with names (i.e., "All but JSON"). The "Process Duplicate Lines" command lets me easily find "duplicates" defined with a match pattern in a 75,000-line JSON file (don't ask). I can build complex operations up and save them as a text factory. I occasionally do operations with its "Shell Worksheet" capability, sort of a weirdo hybrid between a built-in terminal and a persistent text file. (I also like that every project gets its own persistent shell worksheet and persistent "scratch file," which you can set to be any language type.)

I've tried a lot of other editors over the years, including VS Code, and either they don't have features that I use in my technical writing or they don't, at least to me, implement them as well. And as lame as some people undoubtedly think "it works like a Mac app" is as a feature, well, it's actually kind of refreshing to have a full-featured text editor that does that BBEdit works like a Mac app. It seems almost quaint to have an actual preference window come up in a text editor when you select "Preferences..." these days, but it turns out they're actually really good at, you know, setting preferences. (Modifying keyboard shortcuts is so much nicer in BBEdit than in any other editor I've used.)

Again, for coding, BBEdit has fallen behind the times; the structure is there for it to mostly keep up, but the ecosystem just isn't there and, barring a strange resurgence, probably never will be. Personally, I use MacVim for coding bigger projects now -- although I'll generally use BBEdit for short shell or dynamic scripts if it already happens to be open. But for managing huge honking websites with thousands of Markdown source files -- or even just dozens -- I just haven't found anything that beats BBEdit.

Maybe it’s for people like me that have never learned emacs.

What Photoshop is to images, BBEdit is to text.

Loved that tag line.