I'm curious as to the attraction of BBEdit. Coming from a Unix/Windows background, I find that whilst it seems pretty solid and has some nice features, it costs at least five times more than any sane person should be prepared to pay. But even taking that into account, it actually seems to do *less* (at least for me!) than the free alternatives that ship by default on OS X (personally, I use Vim).
I know vim, but not super well - what does it do that BBEdit does not? I imagine if you already know vi/vim well and have it customized to your liking, there's no need to pay for anything else. Personally, I've been using it off & on for about 10 years and still don't know how to use most of it's features. Most of the time when I have advanced processing to do I copy the file locally and edit using BBEdit.
OK, so its integration into the enitre OS is generally a lot better than the "free" stuff, but...
Well, for Mac users that's a huge distinction, especially if you don't already know vi or emacs. There isn't really any learning curve to deal with.
So why the attraction? Is it really only old OS <=9 users that use it, or am I really missing something?
Well, I imagine a lot of it's following started during the OS <= 9 days, when things like vi or emacs weren't really available. It also served as a replacement for things like grep and sed which weren't available at the time. I'd imagine that for many people it's the interface - you can accomplish a ton of things that are doable with command line tools but that most people don't know how to do. Here are some of the things I find really useful:
Effortless & transparent handling & switching of line endings.
Powerful HTML tools
Shell "worksheets" (allows easy editing & running of shell commands)
Multi-file regular expression find & replace functionality, with nameable saveable expressions
Transparent FTP/SFTP support
Easy scriptability and integration with command line tools
Ian