BBEdit is very old school, but very comprehensive. I used it to write lots of code before TextMate matured enough to be usable.

I still keep an old version of BBEdit around for the odd task that TextMate can't do, but isn't quite complex enough to break out the scripting language.

BBEDit's global find and replace can't be beat.

The biggest complaint I hear from younger developers? BBEdit is too expensive. When I bought my first copy back in the day, it was cheaper -- I think around $40 - $50. Then they doubled the price.

The upgrade price isn't too bad once you've plunked down the initial fee. For mac development, I couldn't take anything else but bbedit -- it had the most hybrid mac/unix feel to any editor.

I could find or assemble a perfect set of snippets for bbedit, with field markers and anything I needed. Atop of that, I could then run it through various filters and their PCRE regex engine. Really, if you grew up on unix, and think in terms of text pipelines and manipulation, bbedit covers your needs really well. Just like unix, it's not the prettiest candidate by far, but it's just damn functional and very easy to tweak to exactly what you want.

These days I'm on unix & win32 (and yes, I do vomit a little in my mouth every morning when I log in), and I stick to a bastard cygwin/emacs setup.

I also think it's really ugly, and much prefer TextMate's project drawer and cmd-T file switching.

At least it can handle big files. TextMate completely chokes on large files and/or projects.

Well reminded. That's the other reason I keep it around, for when I have to force-quit TextMate after attempting to load a big file.

Find and replace is usually the only reason I break out BBEdit, but I thought that could have been because BBEdit was my first editor, so I'm comfortable with it. The regex syntax coloring is so helpful, I don't understand why more editors don't include it.