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BBEdit 16
- KenSF 4mo agoIt still doesn't suck.
- jfb 4mo agoI wonder if it will ever get emacs tabs.
- marcelox86 4mo agoI use emacs but I don't know what you're referring to. Can you enlighten me please
- k33n 4mo agoI think maybe he meant chords.
- jfb 4mo agoThe tab key in BBEdit inserts a literal tab character, or advances to a tab stop. It doesn't indent the line, which is what I would argue it should do when writing code.
- saispas 4mo agoAs a matter of interest, there is a setting `Allow tab key to indent text blocks` (in Settings > Keyboard) – doesn't that do what you're describing?
- DonaldFarfrae 4mo agoPer the manual: > When this option is on, you can press the Tab key to invoke the Shift Right command, or Shift-Tab to invoke the Shift Left command; this may be useful for those accustomed to Windows editing key behavior. When this option is off, pressing Tab will insert a tab character in the normal manner. This option is off by default. I think this is already identical to tab behaviour in Emacs, just not by default.
- jfb 4mo agoTIL! Thank you!
- classichasclass 4mo agoProud user since the classic Mac OS days (anyone else remember the OpenDoc version?), and it's still a solid editor at a good price.
- sigzero 4mo agoSame. Recently moved to Windows (blah) but if I move back, that's a purchase for me.
- Caracas288 4mo agoTextWrangler!
- ndegruchy 4mo ago> Support for vi keyboard emulation, for basic navigation and editing; I'm sure some people will like this update, but it's a big meh for me. I'll wait for some further updates to upgrade.
- dizhn 4mo agoYou can search for text within images.
- ndegruchy 4mo agoThat is genuinely a neat usage, but I don't find myself needing to search through images for text. I am glad they're still updating and working on BBEdit, but the major revision feels a little flat with features.
- f30e3dfed1c9 4mo agoHonestly, I would have preferred the ability to search within PDF files.
- alwillis 4mo agoI've been using BBEdit since the System 7 days or thereabouts. Then I discovered Vim and I was hooked. And then came Neovim, which is still my daily driver. BBEdit has been my never-fail backup editor, especially for Mac-specific tasks. It's been a little awkward because of my Vim muscle memory. Glad to see they're adding Vi/Vim keybindings, which I've wanted for a long time.
- _HMCB_ 4mo agoLove to see this app trending on HN.
- gnerd00 4mo agoSo great to see this -- the last version of BBedit I paid for is the gold standard for me, for editors... I mean compared to twenty other editors of various kinds on desktop Linux and elsewhere..
- throwaway613746 4mo ago[dead]
- headwayoldest 4mo agoI have used and loved Barebones stuff in the past, but strikes me as odd they're still advertising Yojimbo on their main page. It was fantastic, but has been abandoned for quite some time.
- sharkjacobs 4mo agoIt's supported for Tahoe. It's still good functional software and this is the ideal right? They're selling finished software for a flat price without needing a subscription model to support continued development.
- kstrauser 4mo agoYou were downvoted but right. The changelog[0] shows that the current minor version (4.6) came out in 2020, and its only had 3 bugfix releases since then, most recently in 2023. A lot has changed since 2020, so this doesn't know about the major iCloud updates, or Apple Intelligence, or UI changes (not just talking about Liquid Glass either). None of those things imply that it's broken or unusable. Still, it means it's going to feel like a dated app and that's not fun. [0]https://www.barebones.com/support/yojimbo/archived_notes.html https://www.barebones.com/support/yojimbo/archived_notes.htm...
- Barbing 4mo agoIf they add one word, “Legacy“, under the product name, I would likely be adequately warned. Barebones is great!
- debugnik 4mo ago> so this doesn't know about the major iCloud updates, or Apple Intelligence, or UI changes I'm not familiar with macOS: Why would an application need to be updated for any of these? Were the existing APIs insufficient to integrate these?
- kstrauser 4mo agoYes, and that's universally true for all APIs. All of those have added new features that are widely adopted by other apps, and the older apps can't automagically start using new features without using a newer API, or having code added to take advantage of them. For instance, an app can't start using Apple Intelligence if it's compiled with an older version of the SDK that doesn't know that such a thing exists. There are some UI exceptions, such as if the OS starts rendering high-level requests like "draw a button" in a newer style. Lots of other things take specific application support, though. MacOS 14 added desktop widgets. Unless an app adds code to configure and deploy widgets, that's not something the OS can do for it. That means that Yojimbo couldn't possibly offer widgets showing, say, the 5 most recently added documents. If you're OK with not needing or wanting the newer features, and it doesn't rely on some old API that Apple deprecated, then sure, continue to use it! It's still a fine app. But each passing year means that all its updated competitors can do new things that it can't.
- steviedotboston 4mo agoLove BBEdit!
- kstrauser 4mo agoI use Zed more now, but BBEdit's still pretty great. I love, love, LOVE that I can extend it with shell scripts or Python tools or Rust apps or whatever else I have laying around. Sometimes I don't want to write a whole plugin, let alone in JavaScript or whatever. I just want to say "process this text with this tool" and have it work. BBEdit's second to none for that.
- skydhash 4mo agoThat’s the power of vim, emacs, nano, and I think Kate too. Piping the current text and/or collecting the output of a given comment. Another nice thing is the ability to collect paths, line and column numbers from the output for navigation.
- kstrauser 4mo agoFor sure. I use Emacs regularly too, and of course it supports this kind of thing. BBEdit makes it flat out pleasant though. I appreciate how well the new additions melt into the UI.
- skydhash 4mo agoI won’t disagree with that, but my daily driver is OpenBSD. Emacs is what I got ;)
- kstrauser 4mo agoRight on! I have much love for Puffy. You'll never hear me speak evil on Emacs. It's one of mankind's greatest software accomplishments. But I spend most of my days and nights on a Mac, and when in Rome...
- jeffrallen 4mo agoMe neither. But I will speak evil of evil-mode. That's just plain evil.
- 4mo ago
- LeoPanthera 4mo agoMy search for a "just a text editor" ended with "CotEditor". It's Mac native, not Electron, and supports both RTL and vertical text. All I could ever want.
- simondotau 4mo agoThe built-in TextEdit (in plain text mode) is also a perfectly cromulent minimum viable text editor.
- krackers 4mo agoI wonder if anyone has taken the source of TextEdit [1] and added some minor niceties to just make it slightly more convenient for text editing (like adding line numbers). [1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/TextEdit/Introduction/Intro.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/TextE...
- hackermanai 4mo agoNot a textedit fork, but I am building a minimal text editor with niceties based on scintilla. So performance wise on par with Notepad++ et al.
- simondotau 4mo agoI find the free edition of BBEdit to be an excellent middle ground between TextEdit and a full-fat IDE.
- wwalexander 4mo agoThank you very much for this recommendation! Most of my work is in Xcode, and in an ideal world Xcode would just support third-party syntax highlighting (or LSP), and I've been looking for a Mac-assed simple editor for those scenarios where I just want basic syntax support for a random text file. CotEditor is perfect!
- kennywinker 4mo agoIn 1998 bbedit 5.0 cost $120 usd. Adjusted for inflation that would be about $245 usd. Today an individual license costs $60. Wild how software pricing and sales models have changed, and good on bare bones for staying away from subscription pricing.
- factorialboy 4mo agoThe pie (market) has also vastly expanded since 1998. Need to factor that, and not just inflation.
- sedatk 4mo agoProportionally, competition has vastly expanded too.
- kennywinker 4mo agoI assumed that was implied pretty heavily by what I said. Either they were overcharging in 1998, or the market got bigger.
- pokstad 4mo agoThe software world is different today. People expect you to release security updates as vulnerabilities are discovered. They expect you to fix your application so that it works on the newest macOS that deprecated and broke the old APIs you used (or switch architectures). We expect continuous maintenance for a fixed price. I wish Textmate had a yearly charge to keep their team running instead of the one time purchase that starved them.
- hgs3 4mo agoI think there is one major difference that separates the two eras: in ye olden days you bought software for a fixed price and while it's understood you might only receive updates for a limited time, you could continue using it so long as you had the ability to run it. For example, you didn't have to upgrade to Windows XP if you were satisfied with Windows 98. With subscriptions, it's a recurring fee to continue accessing the software at all.
- submeta 4mo agoBBEdit used to be my text-transformation tool. Happily paid for every update for years, even when I used Emacs, I kept BBedit in reach. For quick text edits/transformations (because Regex in Emacs is hard to use). But with LLMs + nvim I hardly start bbedit anymore. So now with LLMs, I tell them what I need and they write a shell/Perl/Python script to make the craziest transformations.
- kstrauser 4mo agoThis really resonates with me. I feel ya. And yet, now those pre-existing tools can make fantastic user interfaces for the new AI-developed things. I just wrote a command line tool to do a thing I needed done, and used Alfred to make a GUI for it. Now it feels like a full-blown GUI, although I just wrote the CLI bits and wrapped them in Alfred. In BBEdit's case, I could see adding all your new tools as text filters to have a standard way for executing them, either through scripting or in a text window.
- alwillis 4mo agoBBEdit has had support for Claude, OpenAI and Ollama (or any OpenAI-compatible LLM) in their AI Chat Sheets feature [1]. [1]: https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/bbedit15.html#:~:text=AI%20Chat%20Worksheets,-BBEdit%2015%20joinshttps://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/bbedit15.html https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/bbedit15.html#:~:t...
- latchkey 4mo agoi still use it as a quick and dirty text editor for things like my .bashrc much love for them sticking with it for so long
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo agoI just checked, and it looks like I have been using BBEdit for almost 35 years (It was initially shareware). Siegel still manages it (I don't know if he is still the main coder). He never sold out.
- e28eta 4mo agoIt's been great software: reliably native, promptly releases updates with macOS changes (I had a retina-capable text editor before I had a retina display for my mac), and consistently updated to fix bugs. Some of the change log entries are impressively obscure. I finally paid for my v15 upgrade ~2 weeks ago, so I wish I could take the credit for the v16 release. But given their long standing, generous policy of giving an updated license if you bought in the last N months (Nov 1st 2025 this time!), I'm actually in great shape and the meme falls very flat.
- ConanRus 4mo ago[dead]
- davedigerati 4mo agoI'm gdam sick of hearing about BBEdit updates and new features, I swear it's almost enough to make me buy another Mac just to get this amazing godlike editor back again, fk I miss it so bad... quit torturing me BareBones
- suobset 4mo agoJust gonna chime in here to mention I am one of the users who has NOT been here since Classic mac or any sort of olden days (I mean, I was born in 2001; there are people who have used BBEdit longer than I have been alive). My first experience with BBEdit was around 2020, and I have had a copy of it ever since on a Mac for light editing. My main dev home is JetBrains IDEs, but I find VS Code too heavy for quick text edits. That, and Shell Worksheets are enough of a game changer that it justifies the whole price.
- f30e3dfed1c9 4mo ago"Added a command to the View menu: 'Gather Untitled Documents'. This will collect all untitled (never saved) documents into the active window, removing them from other windows (and possibly closing those windows in the process)." Honestly, this alone might be worth the upgrade price. I use BBEdit all day every day, and untitled docs tend to proliferate. I use the scratchpad a lot but still end up with lots of untitled docs.
- darkteflon 4mo agoSo, I’ve used BBEdit briefly in the past, and I’m familiar with its stellar reputation. But I’m confused by some of the comments here. Are people mainly using it in place of something like Obsidian? Vim? Emacs? VS Code? Notes? It doesn’t look like it would make for a great IDE but seems to have very powerful text transformation abilities. If I work in VS Code and use Obsidian for notes, is there still a place for something like this? What kinds of workflows are people using it for?
- kstrauser 4mo agoWhen I use it, it’s in place of Emacs or Zed and dealing with smallish projects in well-supported languages. The phrase I hear a lot is that it’s a “Mac-assed Mac app”, integrated into that environment far more than the others. For instance, you can’t script Emacs with Shortcuts or AppleScript. This isn’t objectively better or worse. They have features BBEdit doesn’t. It has features they don’t. The rest largely comes down to taste.
- presbyterian 4mo agoI've used it for basically any text editing task. Quickly jotting stuff down for later, web development, writing articles, drafting emails, whatever. I've used VS Code a lot and have used Obsidian for notes/worldbuilding in TTRPGs, but neither really gave me anything I wasn't already getting in BBEdit for general-purpose coding and text editing, and neither come close to its ability to do elaborate text transformations. These days I use emacs for most of that stuff, but I have such a fondness for BBEdit, and still drop into it for regex stuff enough, that I'm buying the update.
- gullevek 4mo agoGreat and amazing software. And still no multiple cursor support :|
- DonaldFarfrae 4mo agoWell, at least there’s rectangular selection I suppose.
- nsonha 4mo agoA classic "native" software with its clunky UI, "conventional" MacOS.