On Bundles and Packages

I write words, not code, and I’m looking at a migration from TextMate to BBEdit. What drew me (and a lot of other people) to TextMate are its bundles. It’s unbelievable how easy TextMate makes it to write using Markdown.

The manual for text editor from Macromates has this to say about bundles:

5.1 Activation of Bundle Items

If you select Bundles → Bundle Editor → Show Bundle Editor you will see the command center for customizing TextMate.

From this window you can create and edit things like snippets, commands, language grammars, etc. which will be explained in more detail in the following sections.

The latest release of BBEdit introduces packages. The summary of new items in BBEdit 10 has this to say about packages:

Packages – A Package is a collection of the sort of things you’d place into ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/ to extend BBEdit, such as clippings, scripts, language modules, and text filters; but makes it easier to install such items when they are all related to a single type of task, rather than having to manually install and manage items spread out between different folders.

Can BBEdit’s “packages” replicate the success of Textmate’s “bundles”?