Still simple, still powerful, BBEdit is a Mac app legend

You may like Pages and you may tolerate Microsoft Word, but text editor BBEdit has been rightly earning devotees on the Mac for 34 years. Here's how.

There are very few Mac apps that go back this far, and even fewer that remain both actively developed and actually beloved by its users. And there is only one with the trademark "It doesn't suck."

BBEdit is just a text editor, but rather than this meaning it is limited, it means that BBEdit is focused. It is and always has been a plain text editor, it does not also try to be a mind-mapping tool or an image editor or a chatbot.

This is going to read like an unqualified hymn of praise, although there are actually a few qualifications. But this is what BBEdit does to you. While there are other apps I write in for many different purposes, BBEdit does what it does extraordinarily well.

I don't remember when I first came across it, but it would've been before 2000 and possibly before Steve Jobs came back to Apple. Its original version was written in 1989 because of a problem with editing text on the Mac.

After it was released as BBEdit in 1992, Bare Bones Software never stopped developing it.

The problem back then was just that Apple offered an API for handling text, but it couldn't handle large files. The creators of BBEdit were working on a version of the Pascal programming language for Mac that effectively demanded longer files.

While Apple's Pascal faded away, their text editor grew into this favorite for programmers and writers.

If you've never used it, though, it's hard to convey just why BBEdit is so popular among its users. There are people who will never leave the Mac because there isn't a PC version of BBEdit, for instance.

And as you use it, you have such a clear sense that so do its developers. This is not a day job or a side project, BBEdit keeps getting better because its developers add what they want it to do themselves.

"I use BBEdit for everything I produce that involves text: code (C, C++, Objective-C), web site content (HTML, Markdown, Textile), and more," said Rich Siegel, developer of the app, in a 2011 interview. "In a very real sense, BBEdit is written using itself — my daily-use build is the same one that's being beta tested or used in the field by our customers."

So an app that has been available for more than three decades, two hardware architectures ago, is still being actively developed. An app that was meant to be just a "bare bones" text editor is still simple to use, yet it has so many features a keystroke away that it's hard not to gush about this app.

To be fair, there are actually reasons not to use it, there are writers for whom BBEdit is just the wrong choice. But if it suits your writing or it suits how you like to work, BBEdit can make you into a passionate fan.

"BBEdit is legendary because we keep improving it to serve the needs of our customers," Siegel said on the release of version 9. It's now on version 16, which is promoted as having "millions* of new features and refinements (*estimated)."

With marketing like that, BBEdit remains a taste of those early times with the Mac some 34 years after it was first launched. It's serious software that doesn't take itself too seriously.

What BBEdit does and how

The short version is that BBEdit is a text editor. That's not the same thing as a word processor which offers formatting options like styles or margin control, as a text editor is just for getting the words down.

As such a text editor, BBEdit is fast and responsive, and it generally doesn't get in your way. You don't have to set any settings, you can just open it and start typing.

When you have written a lot of text, maybe even over several years, you will start to appreciate a feature called grep. This is a form of regular expression, the feature takes you beyond normal search and replace.

For instance, in any word processor you could search for a date like 01/12/2026. But in BBEdit, you can search for all dates in the document, matching every one of them simultaneously.

It's a form of regular expression. As well as being powerful, though, the BBEdit version includes an on-screen guide to help you through it as simply as possible.

"Our base started as Mac software developers, scientists, system administrators, and other technical users," Rich Siegel told Apple in 2019. "The first big change was popularity among HTML authors and web back-end developers."

"As word spread, we were able to help folks understand that the internet was built with text that you could treat as data or you could treat it as a document," he continued. "So the next wave brought in internet architects, cryptanalysts, and scientists from unexpected disciplines."

Thos unexpected disciplines, he said, included "writers and other content creators-folks who see their text not as data but as words, and who want as little as possible between them and their words."

Overall design

Beyond the simplicity of writing in BBEdit, part of this get-on-with-it design is in how it stores your documents. Unlike most apps other than Ulysses, BBEdit can in theory be a single repository for all of your writing.

So rather than opening and saving documents all the time, you can just open BBEdit, press Command-N and be writing in a new document. Everything you've written before is still there, listed in a navigation bar on the left, until you choose to close it.

You don't even have to save that previous work before you start a new one.

But then if you want to, you can. Anything you write can remain in BBEdit's list on the left of the screen, but you can also save any of it out to separate, individual .txt files.

Then it might not require you to set anything up, and it might not get in your way, but BBEdit is built to help you. So for example, if you type an opening quote mark, BBedit immediately adds a closing one right after it and leaves your cursor in the middle.

It's the same with brackets. Type an opening bracket, and you get that plus a closing one for free. That's chiefly convenient in that it means you can't ever forget to include a closing speech mark or bracket, you'd have to choose to delete them.

If you're a programmer, that can also make the difference between your code working or not. It's easy to forget to close brackets, unless you're writing in BBEdit.

But it is also a little pain when you're writing dialog. So often you're going to follow a speech with a phrase like "she said," and to do that you have to cursor over the automatically-inserted end quote mark.

You may well have just shrugged at that, and if you did, it's because you are the true target audience for BBEdit. While any type of writer can use it, and every type of writer does, it is best for coders and programmers.

These are people whose writing tends to be in short lines rather than paragraphs. So they may never even need to notice something about BBEdit lines that will strike a novelist or a journalist immediately.

That's how, by default, BBEdit does not wrap text at the end of the screen or at some margin stop. You could write a novel on the same long single line if you wanted to.

But then you could alternatively go to Settings, Editor Defaults, and turn on Soft Wrap. Set it to wrap your text at a specific character count, at the width of your default page size for printing, or the width of the window.

There are hundreds upon hundreds of settings you can change, but none that you have to in order to start writing. You can readily believe the gag that it has "millions" of new features, but this is still not an app where you have to study the manual.

Although, actually, there is a manual. In another throwback to the early days of the Mac, there exists to this day a 456-page BBEdit manual, and it is constantly updated.

How it got here

BBEdit began as this way to address a problem on the Mac. Today you know TextEdit as the name of Apple's free text editing app, but back in the day, it was what the company called its text handling API.

If you wanted to include text in your app, from a word processor to just labels on a drawing, you could use this API and it did the job. But it wouldn't handle anything over 32K, it wouldn't handle anything long.

BBEdit was made to show that longer files could be handled on the Mac. It did the job, it was popular, and in 1992 when it first came out, BBEdit was also free.

That didn't last. Around a year later, Bare Bones Software launched version 2.5 and began selling it for $99 (around $230 in today's money). Users of the previous free ones, or owners of various programming languages such as THINK Pascal, could buy it for $49.

At the same time, Bare Bones Software released a cut-down edition called BBEdit Lite. That was free, and users of it could upgrade to the full BBEdit for $49.

They could get it on a floppy disk by mailing — not emailing, regular postal mailing — the developer on an Massachusetts address. Please enclose a check for $5.

BBEdit Lite no longer exists, and nor does its brief replacement, TextWrangler. That was released in 2003 for $49, offering what Bare Bones Software thought would be a compelling mix of BBEdit features for programmers and database administrators.

Compared to some apps, TextWrangler did well, sticking around 14 years, even if it quickly became free. It may have seemed like it spent much of that time nagging users to upgrade to BBEdit, but come 2017, there was no longer any choice.

TextWrangler was ostensibly folded back into BBEdit and users were encouraged to move to the full app.

"We promise that you will feel right at home, because BBEdit and TextWrangler are identical in every way that you're used to," said the company at the time. "They're built on the same foundation, by the same developers, with the same care; and they work the same way."

Behind the scenes, that must've been a reason to drop TextWrangler. Maintaining the same code base across two apps was surely taking up time that could be spent developing new features.

It certainly wasn't the lure of cash from upgraders that made Bare Bones Software do this. As welcome as that would doubtlessly be, the company also sweetened the deal.

If you bought or upgraded to BBEdit at that time, you could use it for free for 30 days. It's not unusual to have such a trial period, but what happens afterward is much more rare.

Bare Bones Software made it so that you could continue using the app for free, with just a limited feature set. What it left in was generous, and really it created what was effectively a new, free, BBEdit Lite in all but name.

BBEdit and Apple

If you're a long-time Mac user, you may distantly remember technologies such as OpenDoc, but you're unlikely to have used any of it. Bare Bones Software has, it even added OpenDoc support to BBEdit.

BBEdit has been a good Mac citizen from the start but sometimes you don't know what you've got until it's gone. That happened with Apple and BBEdit over the Mac App Store.

While it's never really seen a fraction of the business that the iPhone App Store has, the Mac version has been around longer than you think. It debuted in 2011 and BBEDit was right there as one of the very first products on the Mac App Store.

By 2014, though, it was gone.

The reasons given at the time were not very specific, but they centered on how the Mac App Store sandboxes apps. Any app on the store is deliberately limited to prevent it being able to control the user's Mac or other apps.

In BBEdit's case, the app was reportedly not allowed full access to the user's files and folders. It needed to be able to open and save wherever the user wanted, and at the time, Apple put limits on this.

There was also, though, an issue of money. While BBEdit was a one-time purchase, Bare Bones Software has always issued paid upgrades at intervals.

The Mac App Store did not allow for paid upgrades once a user had bought the app. So the company could have gained a true believer but never know it, never profit from it, and that user would never know what new features were available.

By 2019, enough developers had complained about sandboxing that Apple made some changes. They were sufficient to mean that BBEdit came back on the Mac App Store, but perhaps chiefly because there was now a solution to the upgrade problem.

While Apple still does not allow paid upgrades, it both allows and encourages subscriptions. So today you can buy BBEdit 16 from the developer for a one-off $60, but you can subscribe via the Mac App Store for $5/month, or $50/year.

And if you were looking when BBEdit returned to the Mac App Store in 2019, you will have seen Apple rushing to make up for arguably ignoring it. That return saw an App Store front page profile of its main developer, Siegel, plus an article about BBEdit's search features, and another about its overall feature set.

At that time, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing was Phil Schiller, who oversaw the App Store. He tweeted a welcome back to BBEdit, although that tweet is no longer available since Schiller quit Twitter/X back in 2022.

There's something missing

BBEdit sounds perfect. Unless you're a novelist or a screenwriter, or perhaps even a non-fiction author, maybe it is. And if you are any of those things, you can make BBEdit work for you if its comprehensive yet no-nonsense feature set appeals.

What you can't do is make BBEdit work on anything other than a Mac. There's no PC version, for example, although if you cared about that you wouldn't be reading this far into an AppleInsider article.

The real missing piece is the iPad.

It's been some years since Bare Bones Software has talked about why it's stayed Mac-only. So perhaps things will change, but 37 years after starting it, and 34 since it went on sale, BBEdit is a legend among macOS apps.

Enough so that it's one of the very, very few apps I would enthuse about this much. Bare Bones Software and Naomi Pearce helped out with finding images like that ancient photo of the boxed version, but they haven't read this prior to publication, and they certainly didn't pay for it.

Try it out for yourself. Once again, it may not be the right writing tool for you, but if it is, you'll become a fan.

BBEdit 16 for Mac is available for $60 direct from the developer as a one-time purchase. You can also get it from the Mac App Store on subscription for $5/month, or $50/year.