
There are too many useful feature in other editors. I would never do serious editing work in it, though. It's also a nice scratch pad, because it preserves unsaved documents between launches. I use BBEdit when I need something to launch really, really quickly or open a document with a guarantee that it won't crash (like something really big, or where the syntax parsing is likely to kill other editors for whatever reason). VS Code certainly has lots of features and extensions, but I remain quite happy with BBEdit and its Mac interface.Įlectron Mac Mac App macOS 10.15 Catalina Open-source Software Programming Text Editor Visual Studio Code Correspondingly, there isn’t a way a new text editor can leapfrog VS Code the same way previous text editors have been leapfrogging each other by improving extensions. Ever since TextMate, extensions have increased in prominence and capabilities, and with VS Code, that progression appears to have culminated. With VS Code, the extension-based text editor has seemingly reached its final form. VS Code has reached unprecedented levels of popularity and refinement, laying a foundation that could mean decades of market dominance. I believe the era of new text editors emerging and quickly becoming popular has now ended with Visual Studio Code. For big complicated desktop software, has any other category ever had so much movement? Text editors have been a category with a lot of movement: In the last 20 years, TextMate, Sublime Text, and Atom have all been the text editor with the most momentum.

Sublime Text was released in 2008, a sprightly youth compared to Excel and Illustrator. According to the Stack Overflow Annual Developer Survey, Sublime Text was the most popular text editor available on the Mac from 2015–2017. Text editors, on the other hand, are a software category where the most popular options are not the oldest.
