I’ve become quite the open source fan over the last several years, due mostly to apache and linux. Sometimes I have these twinges of guilt about it though. Yesterday I was offered the option to get an update to BBEditfor my mac at work and after thinking about it for a minute I declined. I just don’t need it anymore. I’ve been using BBEdit on Macs since before the internet, in the days of system 6 when it was just this great text editor, and it’s been a central part of my toolkit during my entire career. Until the last year or so that is, as jedit slowly replaced it. The main advantage jedit has over BBedit aside from being free is that it works the same on all platforms – my two linux boxes at home, the mac and pc at work, my gaming rig, my lab full of machines at work – on all of them I have the same editing environment. Jedit is also wonderfully extensible – everything from XML indenters to wiki editors are available and there’s an active development community supporting further extensions to the editor.

So what’s BareBones to do? How can they compete with free? Who is going to continue buying their text editor when they can just download Jedit and have a more extensible editor running in a matter of minutes? I guess I don’t see how BBEdit can survive in the long run with things like Jedit to compete against.

One other observation: Jedit is my favorite example of the potential of Java finally being realized. For at least 5-6 years we’ve been promised this ‘write it in Java and it will run on any platform’ future, but in almost all cases this meant buggy and slow software with crufty interfaces. Jedit breaks that mold. It’s a little memory hungry due to the Java overhead but otherwise you wouldn’t really notice it’s a Java based package.

Erm…one other observation. I guess eclipse deserves the same sort of credit, and actually its interface is even better than Jedits.