On the basis of high recommendation, an outstanding reputation and an impressive feature list, I’ve been trialling BBEdit on my Mac. My primary needs, as noted before are PHP, XHTML, CSS, and XML – nothing out of the ordinary there for your average professional web developer, and handled capably thus far with HomeSite on Windows. Again, not out of the ordinary, I work with a dedicated development server both here at home and at work, and by running SMB on my development servers I can treat them just like a local file system and work directly from those shares when I need to.

Except in BBEdit, that is. I’ve got this problem whereby I can’t create or modify files with BBEdit if the files are being accessed across an SMB share (i.e. browsed for across the network from my file manager – Finder in this case). My first conclusion was that I had the permissions incorrectly set on the server – even though this had been working find from Windows authenticating as the same user. I figured that maybe Windows had been slack with how it was handling the finer points of unix-style permissions at letting me get away with a bad config – although as I thought about it I realized that this doesn’t make sense, as it’s the server enforcing the security, not the client.

So I checked all the permissions on the server – everything seemed good. I checked that I could still use the share as normal from my Windows box – I could. So I fired up SimpleText on my Mac – and I could modify files from there too. It looks like this problem lies somewhere with BBEdit, or at the very least the default configuration it ships with. So I emailed BareBones Software and asked if they knew what was happening. Evidentially, they don’t have a clue. Whilst quick and responsive (and always polite) with initial troubleshooting suggestions, as soon as it became apparent that the problem wasn’t anything straightforward they went cold on me. So I’m kinda in a jam. I don’t want to pay out for BBEdit when I can’t use it to do this simple thing – however, I suspect I won’t get any further with BareBones until I’m a paying customer (which is perfectly understandable).

Anyone got any suggestions why this isn’t working? In the mean time I’ve been using skEdit which is coping with the same situation just fine. It’s actually quite a nice editor too.