The 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.
You're making this up to justify subscription model guilt. Nobody (besides those on here) EXPECTS this. In fact, most would rather live with the risks than deal with subscription model, let alone the headaches of updating and it breaking everything (i.e. causing a chain reaction that you have to update EVERYTHING in order to fix a small non-issue).
I, in fact, do NOT want continuous maintenance. Ever. I will literally never turn on auto-updates for the rest of my life.
I 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.
I would rather software companies sell at more realistic prices so that they have a sustainable business, and signal to others in the industry that it's still possible to build a sustainable business.
No, we should not praise software companies for hobbyist practices like selling $1 app on the App Store, which say, 30% goes to a digital distribution store, and then of your after distribution fees, about 20%+ percent goes to the federal and local government.
Pay for updates, and charge rightfully like you're supporting an engineer's salary, and that you have a commercial real estate lease to pay, and the compensation packages of full-time employees with benefits.
And boo people who say otherwise. No other professional field do I know of exists where cheap bastards abound while the entire industry is dependent on monopolies to pay the high wages of engineers.
No other professional field I know of lets workers invent and alter their own tools, collaboratively, for free, and share them for free with all their colleagues.
If surgeons could wiggle their fingers and make a better scalpel, at no cost, and give a copy to all their friends, also at no cost, I bet they'd have some pretty spiffy scalpels going around soon and many docs would stop paying for them.
Unfortunately Apple doesn’t allow paid updates short of releasing a whole separate app, and you can’t do upgrade discounts for current owners except via weird bundle discounts by sticking the new and old versions together as a package. So Apple is to blame for all the subscriptions.
BBEdit is a small private company, no VCs. They probably make a ton of cash (by normal standards) for the owners at this point and doing right by their customers and not rocking the boat through profit maximization strategies is a long term play that VCs could not put up with.
Implying that one of the oldest still actively developed commercial text editors is not doing sustainable business practices kinda misses the mark. They’ve been at this since 1992, 34 years ago. I think they know their business.
> No, we should not praise software companies for hobbyist practices like selling $1 app on the App Store, which say, 30% goes to a digital distribution store, and then of your after distribution fees, about 20%+ percent goes to the federal and local government.
For hobbyists with revenue less than $1 million per year, the App Store commission is 15%.
And amazingly free version is very usable as well. It’s same BBEdit package, and without license it doesn’t activate extra features, which I don’t need anyway. They used to ship it as free separate editor TextWrangler and now rolled it in into main BBEdit instead.
It'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.
My 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.
Thank 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!
I 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).
I 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.
For 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.
So, 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?
When 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.
I'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.
I 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.
It'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.
You 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.
Just 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.
"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.
So 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..
I'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
The 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.
I'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.
That 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.
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.
This 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.
In 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.
The 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.
You're making this up to justify subscription model guilt. Nobody (besides those on here) EXPECTS this. In fact, most would rather live with the risks than deal with subscription model, let alone the headaches of updating and it breaking everything (i.e. causing a chain reaction that you have to update EVERYTHING in order to fix a small non-issue).
I, in fact, do NOT want continuous maintenance. Ever. I will literally never turn on auto-updates for the rest of my life.
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I 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.
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Software today is worse in every possible way. Subscription solicitation is one such dimension.
BBEdit, Sublime et al. are beacons of what software quality, distribution and pricing ought to be.
three quarters of the saas industry is built around such made-up needs. Not much to be proud of there with a handful of exceptions.
as for price, it feels 100% fair to bleed your enterprise customers to subsidize individual customers.
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Yep. Give people two choices.
1) Purchase a major version and get no updates.
2) Purchase a subscription and get constant updates.
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One should be able to write a text editor without security vulnerabilities.
I would rather software companies sell at more realistic prices so that they have a sustainable business, and signal to others in the industry that it's still possible to build a sustainable business.
No, we should not praise software companies for hobbyist practices like selling $1 app on the App Store, which say, 30% goes to a digital distribution store, and then of your after distribution fees, about 20%+ percent goes to the federal and local government.
Pay for updates, and charge rightfully like you're supporting an engineer's salary, and that you have a commercial real estate lease to pay, and the compensation packages of full-time employees with benefits.
And boo people who say otherwise. No other professional field do I know of exists where cheap bastards abound while the entire industry is dependent on monopolies to pay the high wages of engineers.
No other professional field I know of lets workers invent and alter their own tools, collaboratively, for free, and share them for free with all their colleagues.
If surgeons could wiggle their fingers and make a better scalpel, at no cost, and give a copy to all their friends, also at no cost, I bet they'd have some pretty spiffy scalpels going around soon and many docs would stop paying for them.
7 replies →
Unfortunately Apple doesn’t allow paid updates short of releasing a whole separate app, and you can’t do upgrade discounts for current owners except via weird bundle discounts by sticking the new and old versions together as a package. So Apple is to blame for all the subscriptions.
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BBEdit is a small private company, no VCs. They probably make a ton of cash (by normal standards) for the owners at this point and doing right by their customers and not rocking the boat through profit maximization strategies is a long term play that VCs could not put up with.
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Implying that one of the oldest still actively developed commercial text editors is not doing sustainable business practices kinda misses the mark. They’ve been at this since 1992, 34 years ago. I think they know their business.
3 replies →
> No, we should not praise software companies for hobbyist practices like selling $1 app on the App Store, which say, 30% goes to a digital distribution store, and then of your after distribution fees, about 20%+ percent goes to the federal and local government.
For hobbyists with revenue less than $1 million per year, the App Store commission is 15%.
Customer acquisition and retention is so very hard and expensive. It’s a tough equation.
The pie (market) has also vastly expanded since 1998. Need to factor that, and not just inflation.
Proportionally, competition has vastly expanded too.
I assumed that was implied pretty heavily by what I said. Either they were overcharging in 1998, or the market got bigger.
And amazingly free version is very usable as well. It’s same BBEdit package, and without license it doesn’t activate extra features, which I don’t need anyway. They used to ship it as free separate editor TextWrangler and now rolled it in into main BBEdit instead.
It's only natural for products where the marginal cost to produce is zero to get cheaper as the market expands.
The landscape has changed significantly. In 2007, OS X itself (10.5 Leopard) cost $129.
I wish SlickEdit would take the hint...
I 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.
It'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.
My 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.
Thank 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!
The built-in TextEdit (in plain text mode) is also a perfectly cromulent minimum viable text editor.
I 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/TextE...
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Proud user since the classic Mac OS days (anyone else remember the OpenDoc version?), and it's still a solid editor at a good price.
TextWrangler!
Same. Recently moved to Windows (blah) but if I move back, that's a purchase for me.
I 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.
That’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.
For 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.
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So, 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?
When 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.
I'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.
It still doesn't suck.
I 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.
It'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.
You 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.htm...
If they add one word, “Legacy“, under the product name, I would likely be adequately warned.
Barebones is great!
> 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?
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Love to see this app trending on HN.
Just 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.
"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.
So 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..
Great and amazing software.
And still no multiple cursor support :|
A classic "native" software with its clunky UI, "conventional" MacOS.
Love BBEdit!
I'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
i 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
I wonder if it will ever get emacs tabs.
I use emacs but I don't know what you're referring to. Can you enlighten me please
The 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.
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I think maybe he meant chords.
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> 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.
I'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.
You can search for text within images.
That 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.
Honestly, I would have preferred the ability to search within PDF files.
BBEdit 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.
This 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.
BBEdit 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#:~:t...