I suspect the fact that I didn't grow up with BBEdit is part of the issue. The fact that I'm a pure Mac OS X guy with zero pre-Mac OS X experience probably contributes to feeling like I'm missing part of the BBEdit joke. Yeah, Zap Gremlins. Ha ha. I get it. Clever, but great design?

I picked up BBEdit around 1993 or 1994 and at the time it really did rock, or in BBEdit humor, 'It didn't suck'. I simply refused to edit all my HTML by hand in something like vi.

Up until around 2001 I also used it as bonus filtering criteria when sifting through web development resumes. In the early days if you knew BBEdit versus the hordes hacking away in something like Notepad you were probably among the cream of the crop when doing web development was largely HTML, animated gifs, and some Perl CGIs. If you saw BBEdit on the resume they got an extra checkmark. Homesite and later Dreamweaver eventually showed up and knocked BBEdit off it's perch as a premier HTML editor.

With Mac OS X, BBEdit never went back and updated the look and feel other than some superficial stylings. The menus are cluttered, and I hardly remember where the HTML tools are. I still used it like Rands as my default text editor on the Mac, but I wasn't all that impressed with it anymore.

I switched over to TextMate about 9 months ago, and I haven't looked back. BBEdit hasn't been opened since.