Everyone's favourite text editor has been updated. BBEdit 14 requires Mac OS X 10.14.2 or later, and is compatible with macOS 10.15 "Catalina" and macOS 11 "Big Sur". Native on Macs with the M1 processor

What's New

Anaconda Virtual Environments - Anaconda is particularly popular with data scientists, as well as with others who need to rapidly switch between different tooling and library configurations. BBEdit 14 will use conda or miniconda to detect your virtual environments, and provides a mechanism for switching the active environment for use when running Unix tools and scripts from within BBEdit.

New Built-In Languages - BBEdit 14 adds built-in syntax coloring and function navigation support for Go, R, Rust, Lisp-family languages (Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure), and Pixar Universal Scene Description (USD) text files.

Enhanced Developer Features - BBEdit 14 enables several new features and significant improvements to its built-in coding aids for developers, including:

Enhanced language-specific text completions; Improved Find Definition; Assistance for specifying function parameters; New code-navigation features; In-window highlighting of syntax and semantic issues; Language-specific document reformatting. These feature improvements are the result of new built-in support for the Language Server Protocol ("LSP") by which user-installed local "language servers" implement key language-sensitive behaviors. Specific available features may vary by language and by server.

Full details are here.

 

29 years ago BBEdit was first released.

Since then in my eyes it is firmly established as the text editor that I compare all others with. I've been using it since the very start and I've lost count of the times that BBEdit has saved me when I've needed to edit vast text or data files. I still have a bunch of applescripts that I wrote that helped me automate the updating of my first website.

BBEdit It (still) doesn't suck.

 

BBEdit has been my "go to" tool for text editing for over 25 years. The latest release version 13.5 is a feature update and squashes a few bugs. BBEdit 13 requires Mac OS X 10.14.2 or later, and is compatible with macOS 10.15 "Catalina".

As you might expect the folks at BareBones this version of BBEdit runs natively on Apple Silicon.

Have you ever had the experience where you make a new document, put some text into it, and then later on, when you're closing it (either alone or as part of closing a bunch of documents), you click the "Don't Save" button? And then, an ohnosecond later, you realize you've made a terrible mistake?

Now BBEdit keeps a snapshot that can be accessed using the "Rescued Documents" item on the Window menu submenu. BBEdit will also do some housekeeping for you, if you like. By default it will clean up old data after a week, but you can adjust the interval from 1 to 365 days; or disable the cleanup altogether.

Added "Randomize order" as an option for "Sort Lines". If turned on, this overrides all other sorting options, and will generate a random ordering for all lines in the document.

"Markdown Cheat Sheet", this opens a floating window showing common Markdown constructions.

When running on macOS 10.15 and later, there's an additional command on the Window menu: "Move to [Display]", where "[Display]" is the name of an eligible attached display.

 

Everyone's favourite text editor BBEdit has been updated to version 13.1.3

This update is simply a bug fix there are no new features.

The release notes are here.

 

Everyone's favourite text editor has been updated to version BBEdit 13.1.

The release notes describe all the changes in detail.

Updated Markdown support

BBEdit has built-in support for cmark as well as "classic" Markdown (Gruber's original Markdown.pl script). In addition, if you have Discount, MultiMarkdown, cmark-gfm, or Pandoc installed, BBEdit can use those as well. If a particular tool is not installed, its corresponding option on the menu is disabled.

There's a new command on the Text menu: "Run Unix Command". This opens a sheet into which you can enter a Unix command line, and choose where the output goes, this can be extremely useful for quick (or simple) "one shot" Unix commands that aren't worth the effort of writing a filter.

Added language-specific settings for Python, to provide explicit control over, which Python to use (python or python3, or a custom one of your choosing), whether to allow the document's "#!" line to override the choice of interpreter and whether to use flake8 for syntax checking.

And a number of other new features for tidying text and HTML.

I also liked reading amount the bug fixes

Fixed weirdness in the Pattern Playground window when making certain edits in the search pattern field. (I'm sure that the people who wrote NSTextView can explain why it does that, but probably nobody else can.)

 

BBEdit has been updated to version 13.0.5, this contains no new features but a number of important bug fixes.

BBEdit 13.0 requires Mac OS X 10.14.2 or later, and is compatible with macOS 10.15 "Catalina".

The full release notes are here.

I feel that BBEdit is the best text editor available for Mac OS X, and it is an essential tool for anyone needing to manipulate text file, be it, programming in most languages, automating text manipulations, find/replace, searching using grep, across multiple files across multiple folders, including very, very large text files.

 

Everyone's favourite text editor BBEdit 13 Now Available! (October 3, 2019)

This major release offers over a hundred feature additions, changes, and refinements, including Pattern Playgrounds, the Grep Cheat Sheet, enhanced Dark Mode support, and readiness for macOS Catalina. Read all about it!

BBEdit 13 is a paid upgrade (US$29.99 or US$39.99) for all licensed customers with BBEdit 12.6.7 or earlier.

BBEdit 13 is a free upgrade for all licensed BBEdit 12 customers who purchased their license on or after May 1, 2019.

If you have been using BBEdit 11 or 12 in Free Mode, BBEdit 13.0 will restart your evaluation period. You'll have access to all of BBEdit 13's features for 30 days, after which BBEdit will return to feature-limited operation.

 

Everybody's favourite text editor BBEdit has been updated.

BBEdit 12.6.7 contains fixes for reported issues.

BBEdit 12.6.7 does not add any new features. (It doesn't take away any, either.)

Made a change to ask the OS-provided print panel to place the page attribute controls (orientation, scaling, paper size) in the panel proper, rather than hiding them behind the "Page Attributes" section in the popup menu.

Plus several bug fixes

 

BBEdit 12.6 has been released and this is a very significant update. BBEdit is now a sandboxed application which means there are a number changes to the way permissions are handled.

It is well worth reading the Release Notes which offer a very detailed explanation of the situation.

Without unrestricted access to your files and folders, many of BBEdit’s most useful features, from the basic to the most powerful, won't work at all; or they may misbehave in unexpected ways. At the very least, this hinders your ability to work done.

In order to resolve this fundamental conflict between security and usability, we have devised a solution in which BBEdit requests that you permit it the same sort of access to your files and folders that would be available to a non-sandboxed version.

There are also many additions, changes and fixes.

 

BBEdit 12.5 requires Mac OS X 10.12.6 or later, and is compatible with macOS 10.14 "Mojave".

If you are using macOS 10.13 "High Sierra", please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version (10.13.6 or later).

If you are using macOS 10.14 "Mojave", please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version (10.14.1 or later).

There are a number of new additions

• There is a new command on the "Go" menu: "Commands...". This brings up a modal panel which lists everything that you can do from a menu in BBEdit: menu commands, clippings, scripts, stationery, text filters, as well as open text documents and recent file.
• You can now generate lipsum, using the "Lorem Ipsum" command on the Insert submenu of the Edit menu.
• Added support for Grep patterns to Canonize. This can be turned on using the check box in the "Canonize" dialog box; or by using a mode line in a Canonize data file.
• Multi-File Search results windows now get a "reload" button, which you can use to repeat the search using the same settings.

Full details are in the release notes.

 

BBEdit 12.1.2 is a minor update to my favourite text editor.

From the release notes.

There's a new item in the Application preferences, as part of the software update settings: "Early Access". You can use this to turn on (or off) notification of pre-release maintenance updates for the version of BBEdit that you're using. (Note that even if you turn on Early Access, you will not receive notice of pre-release versions of feature updates or major upgrades.)

A new setting in the "Editing" preferences allows you to control whether tick marks appear in the scroll bar for Live Search matches. Turning this off can be useful if you're working in very large files and have so many results that the application stalls while trying to update the marks.

There are also a number of bug fixes including.

Fixed bug in which the Markdown tokenizer was confused by empty URL references (e.g. ) in such a way that editing in certain subsequent parts of the file would cause syntax coloring to get out of whack. This change also fixes a bug in the Markdown syntax coloring in which links with an empty description or URL were not properly recognized and colored.

BBEdit 12.1.2 requires Mac OS X 10.11.6 or later, and is compatible with macOS 10.13 "High Sierra"

I use BBEdit extensively for Markdown editing but there are a number of alternatives.

 

BBEdit everyone's favourite text editor has been updated. This looks to be a substantial update with over 100 new features and refinements, the full release notes are available here.

A couple of features look very useful

There's a new submenu on the Edit menu, "Columns". This submenu contains commands to help you work more easily with column-delimited text files. The three basic commands, "Cut Columns", "Copy Columns", and "Clear Columns" work similarly to their top-level analogues. The columns to be cut/copy/cleared are determined by the selection range: to cut a single column, for example, click in the middle of it. You can cut/copy/clear multiple columns by selecting text across them. The "Rearrange Columns" command gives you an easy way to, well, rearrange the columns in a column-delimited text document. Choose the menu command, and then drag the items into the list to order them as you would like, then press the "Apply" button.

There's a new command on the Text menu: "Canonize". This command is useful for doing batch search-and-replace operations in a file, using another file as a list of search-and-replace transformations.

BBEdit 12.0 requires macOS 10.11.6 ("El Capitan") or later, and is compatible with macOS 10.13 "High Sierra". I've added it to the list of Scientific Applications under High Sierra

 

BBEdit 11.6.7 contains fixes for reported issues, as well as refinements to new features that were added in BBEdit 11.6.

Always browsing through the release notes.

When running on 10.13, the application no longer attempts to use the built-in "Consolas for BBEdit" font, because the OS won't load it and instead defaults to some proportional monstrosity. (If you are finding that this happens anyway, go to the "Editor Defaults" preferences and use the "Restore Defaults" button.)

32-bit compatibility: Since Apple has explicitly stated that macOS High Sierra will run 32-bit applications, there is no immediate compatibility concern. We do plan to release a 64-bit version of BBEdit, which we expect to have ready well before OS support becomes an issue.

 

My favourite text editor BBEdit has just been updated. BBEdit 11.6.3 requires Mac OS X 10.9.5 or later, and is compatible with macOS 10.12 "Sierra". This update contains no new features but includes a number of bug fixes.

BBEdit is my Swiss army knife for opening and editing all sorts of text based file formats, other text editors are available.

 

BBEdit is my favourite text editor and I’ve been a user since way before Mac OSX. The latest update BBEdit 11.6 brings a number of bug fixes and updates but also introduces a new demo mode. For 30 days the full feature set is available for free after which time BBEdit will remain permanently functional with a revised feature set that includes its powerful text editing capabilities but not its web authoring tools or other exclusive features. These features may be re-enabled at any time with a purchased license.

BBEdit 11.6 requires Mac OS X 10.9.5 or later, and is compatible with OS X 10.11 "El Capitan".

BBEdit can be obtained from the online store.

There is also a listing of markdown editors here

 

BBEdit 11.5 has been released.

BBEdit 11.5 adds a variety of new features, and includes changes to existing features and behaviors as well as fixes for reported issues.

Of particular note are

BBEdit now supports the use of iCloud Drive for sharing application support and setup items. This works similarly to the existing Dropbox support: in your "iCloud Drive" folder, create a folder named "Application Support", and then within that create a folder named "BBEdit". You can populate that folder with the contents of your /Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/ folder.

BBEdit now supports the use of iCloud Drive for a shared backup folder: in your "iCloud Drive" folder, create a folder named "BBEdit Backups", and if you have turned on Use Historical Backups, BBEdit will use this folder.

 

I'm a long time BBEdit user but I still enjoy reading tips for making your use of BBEdit more efficient.

This blog post offers some tips for the various "Find" options within BBEdit.

I'd certainly agree with the final comment.

Text editors with limited capabilities keep you at a beginner level, no matter how long you've been using them. Serious text editors have a depth that rewards their users.

 

My favourite text editor has just been updated!

BBEdit 11 has been released, with improved syntax colouring, a sophisticated text clippings manager, updated “Find Differences” and dialog boxes, floating palettes, and many internal subsystems have been rewritten or updated to support new features, improve performance, add refinement, and make future enhancements possible.

In all, BBEdit 11 contains over two hundred additions, changes, and refinements. The detailed change notes contain complete information.

Always worth a read, I particularly liked

Worked around a bunch of antisocial behaviors in the OS that would cause floating windows to end up all over the place after disconnecting and then reconnecting a display (typically an external display connected to the laptop). Now, the OS may still make your palettes dance around like they're on "The Price Is Right", but once you put them where you want them, the application will remember their positions more reliably.

Check the website for upgrade pricing.