BBEdit has a pretty strong ethos of "giving the user what they need" over what they ask for or what they want. Additionally, they obviously put a lot of thought into the interface and how it works. A lot of editors have flash, and an option and plug-in for everything, but I can't find things, the flash distracts me, etc. It feels more GNOME-ish in giving the users fewer good and well-placed options and less KDEish in haphazardly throwing in the kitchen sink <i>somewhere</i> in the menus and preferences if you can ever find it--but I've created a false dichotomy, because BBEdit kind of throws in the kitchen sink without ever feeling like they're just jamming in icons, menu options, and preferences incoherently--best of both worlds. In BBEdit, in addition to the logical placement and thought, they have a well-maintained PDF manual which I've gone through pretty thoroughly a few times. I like to learn software like this, RTFM, then I know what it can do. I don't like to "easter egg hunt"--pick around menus, or pick around half-baked after-thought "documentation" on the editor's website. I don't invest serious time into programs that don't seriously invest in their documentation. For me, it just makes a huge difference in learning a program and knowing what it can do.<p>I also just don't want to curate a mini ecosystem of plugins or extensions to accomplish my work--with varying documentation standards, interoperability, design aesthetic and sensibilities, and so forth. I want want 1st party solutions coherently integrated, full documented and integrated, and BBEdit goes this route, by and large. This isn't a magic bullet, but a different set of trade-offs that I strongly prefer, as you can find <i>just</i> the extension that works <i>just right for you</i> in a thriving ecosystem, but for me, I prefer 1st party "maximize the utility under the curve" kind of thinking, the same way Debian or a Linux distribution makes packaging uniform. Yeah, it's not compiling qmail with my custom set of patches, but as a coherent system, it delivers a lot of value.<p>I use BBEdit as my primary editor for everything, but I tend more toward SREish stuff than heavy development. BBEdit is really in a league of its own in what you might think of as the editor equivalent of "soft skills" like coherent design, ease-of-use, documentation, first-party features not reliant on extensions as opposed to having to use plugins and third party code (with the associated drawbacks, but you really <i>can't</i> match the functionality of your perfectly crafted editor via 20 carefully chosen plugins if you're willing to make an editor your lifestyle) etc. Unfortunately, in practice, that <i>does</i> tend to lose to "hard checkbox features" and extensibility.