Moving from iA Writer to BBEdit

A text editor is probably the single most important piece of software I use on a daily basis. To say that my demands from a text editor are extremely specific would be an understatement. For years I have been switching between iA Writer and something else for most of my writing. When typing LaTeX, for example, I use Texifier; and for code I went from Brackets to Atom to VS Code;¹ and for writing my lab notes, diary and research notes I used Emacs.

Over time I had started to feel that my myriad apps had to be reduced. The Emacs approach was the first one I tried; it was the most obvious one to me and will be to anyone who has used Emacs. As the joke goes, Emacs is an operating system with a text editor in it.² But I quickly realised this approach does not work for me. I prefer dedicated tools. Not different tools, dedicated tools. That means I still had to reduce the number of text editors I used but I would no longer, for instance, use org mode to manage tasks and mu4e for e-mail or the ghastly pdf-tools package that manages to throw an error every other week. Emacs is great, on the other hand, for things like seamless GPG encryption and decryption.

I also had a few hiccups with iA Writer lately: a fairly large copy and paste job (pasting into iA Writer) on my iPad caused the app to freeze. I tried this multiple times with the same results. Meanwhile Apple Notes and Byword (an old favourite I left for iA Writer around 14 years ago) accepted the text instantly. To be clear this is extremely rare, but with the text editor it need only happen once for the experience to have potential costs.

There have been other complaints I have had with iA Writer lately and I understand these are centred around me, an individual, more than users as a community but the heading ‘folding’ feature has been on the way for years now on macOS.³ Also, distraction-free is hardly a great USP to rely on when the real distractions are right there on your computer anyway and the clean UI without frames is simply an answer to the ugliness of proprietary document editors like Google Docs and Microsoft Word.⁴

I am writing this note on BBEdit (as I shall explain presently) but here is a comparison between BBEdit and iA Writer and Emacs opening this very document:

I find them all distraction-free. Perhaps BBEdit has the most UI elements but most are tiny enough that I hardly notice. The use of a single typeface is also not a ‘feature’ anymore, enticing as it was in the earlier days. I use custom set-up of Input Mono everywhere I need monospaced text. Likewise authorship is also not a meaningful feature, in my opinion, and certainly not a feature I ever use. By comparison, BBEdit has the incredible ChatGPT worksheet, a far more unique integration that, once again, does not matter to me because I never use it either.

On Windows iA Writer supposedly has snippets, a feature that is curiously missing on the macOS and iOS variants. On BBEdit I use their version of snippets—called ‘clippings’—regularly to pre-populate the basic yaml structure of my essays and notes. One of the yaml fields is a UUID which BBEdit generates with the #UUID# clipping placeholder. From what I gather this feature is missing on iA Writer.

Nevertheless I first tried to implement a Shortcut to do this with iA Writer. To keep things modular I made one shortcut to generate a UUID (the shortcut is on iCloud if you like) and another to output the yaml format (using the former shortcut within it). I tried using this as a service menu option and it works seamlessly. For now. I made a third shortcut to upload a file to my server via scp and run a couple of commands via SSH. The trouble with this set-up is there is more for me to maintain and I would rather avoid that.

Moving to BBEdit made a lot of sense for me for multiple reasons. First, it is fast, stable and native, same as iA Writer. It has a much better file tree, although some may rightly consider this subjective opinion. But BBEdit opens to a pre-determined project folder which makes it easy to call it up and get to work straight away. BBEdit also has markdown syntax highlighting that does not make a half-baked attempt at hiding the syntax like Obsidian does (in fairness iA Writer gets this one right as well). BBEdit windows are somewhat like Emacs buffers, making it easier for me to switch between the two. And like Emacs it makes frequent backups so crashes are not a worry.⁵

On BBEdit the clippings feature is great and has assignable shortcut keys without the need for me to maintain my own shortcuts. And finally SSH/SFTP is built into BBEdit so I can seamlessly access my server in two clicks, navigate the file tree, open any document right in BBEdit and handle it as if it were a local document; or I can save my local copy to SFTP like I might move it around locally or I can save a copy to SFTP keeping my local copy as a duplicate.

All-in-all switching to BBEdit has significantly streamlined my workflow. This is what I do now when I sit at my desk to type something for my website:

• Open BBEdit with ⌘ ⇧ B
• Create a new file with ⌘ N
• Insert a clipping with ⌘ ⌥ C
• Write
• Upload a copy via SFTP with ⌘ ⌥ ⌃ S

And that is it. Everything takes place within BBEdit and I have so far had no problems. Considering BBEdit is around my age and still going strong, neither of us is likely to bump into problems with this workflow anytime soon. As for iA Writer, I think this is a necessary parting of ways. I no longer see the need for an app just for freedom from distractions nor do I agree with the direction in which the development of iA Writer is headed.⁶ For now I need a reliable workhorse and BBEdit is it.