Meh... I never did figure out what the Mac community loved so much about BBEdit. I do agree that for serious HTML editing it's a very good solution, possibly the best thing out there (though for a guy like me who does bad XHTML for small personal sites, Taco Edit is a much more appropriate choice), and for editing text (as in prose), it's a pretty good tool, but nothing special.

However, when it comes down to editing general structured text (programming, *TeX, etc.) it lags pretty far behind most other editors. Hell, it wasn't until 8.0 that they made it feasible for users to create language plug-ins or to group multiple documents in one window (Yes, I knew it could be done in earlier versions, but it wasn't easy. Before v8.0, you had to write your plug-ins/language modules in C -- and if I remember right you needed CodeWarrior to build the plug-in... I don't think you could use gcc, but I could be wrong on that point). Yep, for this kind of editing, there are many editors that outperform BBEdit (TextMate, SEE, Vim, emacs, etc.) -- and without that crazy, insane price-tag...