While it’s laudable that BBEdit has only crashed a very few times for me, it is absolutely unacceptable BBEdit possesses no autosave/autobackup/working-copy-recovery feature to preserve unsaved work in the event of such a crash. Deeply immersed in a problem, I hadn’t hit the magic save key in about 45 minutes — and then BB went away, and so did all my work.

BBEdit has famously used the “It doesn’t suck” tagline for years (it’s a registered trademark for them, even). Having now been bitten by this jackassery, I realize that such boasts are in fact false advertising. Every other serious editor of which I’m aware either has an autosave feature (of which some are justifiably wary, since it implies overwriting the previous version automatically) or some kind of working copy file from which one may recover from a crash. BBEdit appears to have neither, and this earns it a spot on my Shit List.

Update: In email back from support, their answer turns out to be “Yeah, we don’t do autosave. We might add that someday. Our advice is to save a lot.” Um, right. How about I just use an editor that doesn’t think it’s 1985, and that is FREE besides?