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.
pokstad 24 hours ago [-]
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.
nofunsir 23 hours ago [-]
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.
iknowstuff 22 hours ago [-]
I think you’re in the minority. There are products out there that suit you. They are not mainstream products.
MiddleEndian 20 hours ago [-]
Mainstream behavior doesn't necessarily mean what people want. Many try and fail to stop Windows updates, for instance. I would guess that the majority of the users of the TicketMaster app would rather not use it.
iknowstuff 18 hours ago [-]
Hmmm I can’t think of a subscription app that truly doesn’t have a free/upfront/unupgraded alternative - its just that usually they come with quality issues or poor support, so people choose the better, subscription-based, auto-updating ones.
coldtea 11 hours ago [-]
I can think of plenty of apps that have perfectly fine non-subscription options, and then turned subscription only.
People use them because the products were good or industry standard. They don't prefer them because subscriptions somehow magically enabled them to be better.
They already preferred them over alternatives before subscriptions. If anything, people often complain that they got shittier after the subscription was introduced, once many are onboard and captive.
And people use their subscription versions because a non-subscription version is not made available anymore. The real comparison of what users prefer wouldn't be "X subscription software vs Y non-subscription". It would be "X subscription or X non-subscription".
throwme_123 15 hours ago [-]
I consider my phone scrap as soon as it stops getting security updates. Same goes for almost all proprietary software.
Open source needs updates too, but somehow we take that for granted.
MiddleEndian 20 hours ago [-]
I'm with you. I also hate automatic updates. Times when I want my software to behave differently from the day before without me requesting it: Zero.
It puts the incentives on the wrong spot too. They are no longer incentivized to make shit appealing enough to upgrade.
fastforwardius 13 hours ago [-]
MeThree.
But I think it's not the case incentives are wrong but the reality of business - what do you do when things are feature complete in all the ways that matter?
MiddleEndian 7 hours ago [-]
I dunno, what does Jordan's Furniture do about the fact that the recliner I'm sitting on is feature complete and has been since 2005 and seems to be sturdy enough to last me for the next twenty years? Try to sell me something better, try to sell me different things, try to sell things to other people, and succeed or fail at those goals.
I haven't used a Mac in a bit but I remember liking BBEdit back in the 00s, and it still seems to exist without having a subscription model.
hgs3 23 hours ago [-]
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.
pokstad 23 hours ago [-]
Windows sells more copies of its software the OEM route. Also, they sell specific versions that eventually end support. Today you might consider Windows almost a loss leader since Microsoft is diversified with many services on top of windows.
simjnd 23 hours ago [-]
It ignores the point. If I've bought BBEdit 13 for 60 USD three years ago and I'm still happy with it, I can keep using it for the rest of my life without paying more. If I want the new features, then I can pay 40 USD to get the latest version.
This is a sane AND a sustainable model for companies, and actually creates MORE incentives for the developers to align with the user's interest: if the new update sucks and has features no one asked for, then nobody will pay for the new version and keep the old one.
There is no reason why previous versions of the software you paid a license for should effectively "disappear".
simondotau 22 hours ago [-]
I’m a fan of the subscription model where if you stop paying, you continue to have a license for the last version you got during the subscription.
I’ve appreciated that in a few apps where my need for them on a daily basis evaporated but I still need to briefly touch that system once every few months.
gofreddygo 14 hours ago [-]
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.
asyncze 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jms703 23 hours ago [-]
Yep. Give people two choices.
1) Purchase a major version and get no updates.
2) Purchase a subscription and get constant updates.
bayindirh 23 hours ago [-]
Or use "The Dutch Model":
Pay for the major version, get all of its updates. Then pay for update (to next major plus its updates) with a discount.
If you don't prefer the pay, you can keep what you have.
This is what Reaper, Forklift, CameraBag and countless others do, and it works very well.
Edit: This comment contained Forklift as an example before, but they have changed their model, so it's removed.
tpmoney 5 hours ago [-]
I’m a big fan of JetBrains model for this. Buy the software on a subscription, and the subscription gets cheaper for the first 3 annual renewals. While you’re subscribed you get access to the most current version and when you stop subscribing you have a lifetime license for the latest major version (and it’s patches) that you’ve paid for at least a year of. The subscription helps fund the continuous development that is expected of modern software but you still get to keep something for having invested that money when you’re done.
kstrauser 22 hours ago [-]
Forklift only sells you a year of updates at a time now.
bayindirh 22 hours ago [-]
Yeah, you're right. I remembered it now. However, they have stopped doing "major" releases at the same time, too.
Let me update the comment.
_carbyau_ 20 hours ago [-]
^^ This. ^^
Choices!
As a customer, so many frustrating things boil down to not being given a choice. Not even having a tickbox to express which way you'd like it even if the default is otherwise.
prmoustache 15 hours ago [-]
One should be able to write a text editor without security vulnerabilities.
bellowsgulch 24 hours ago [-]
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.
kstrauser 24 hours ago [-]
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.
bellowsgulch 23 hours ago [-]
Your comment is hilarious, because of the people most suited to manufacture a better scalpel, it's people in healthcare because of their income being in the 1% of individual compensation distribution.
Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.
Where is this mythical no cost software you're talking about? Is it in the room with us right now?
Where does your income come from again? Is it this same zero cost software we're talking about right now? The same zero cost software that an employer pays you a salary and benefits for, or...?
kstrauser 21 hours ago [-]
> Your comment is hilarious, because of the people most suited to manufacture a better scalpel, it's people in healthcare because of their income being in the 1% of individual compensation distribution.
Yeah, but takes nation-state amounts of money to bring new medical devices to market.
> Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.
Buy a laptop, Linux, self, Linux, Linux, Linux. There, zero cost for an individual person to write software on the laptop they already owned for other reasons.
Put another way, my kid can sit down at their computer and write a web browser without paying a single additional penny.
I don't owe it to anyone to pay them money instead of writing an equivalent version myself. I choose to pay some vendors money because they've done nice work and I'd rather slip them cash than spend the time to re-invent their particular wheel. That's the category BBEdit's in for me and why I buy their apps. But I don't have to. And yes, I give away literally 100% of my off-work software for anyone else to use who wants to. I wrote those things with free tools for free languages to run on free operating systems, so why not give back? I have a day job to put food on the table. My hobby projects are entirely in the FOSS world that you seem to have forgotten exists.
doublerabbit 23 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Blacksmithing, metal working?
idle_zealot 23 hours ago [-]
Did I miss blacksmiths gaining the ability to infinitely duplicate and teleport their finished pieces into people's hands? Can one learn this power?
exe34 23 hours ago [-]
Teleport? You mean over fiber optics that cost millions to install and maintain?
idle_zealot 23 hours ago [-]
Hey, if it only cost millions to install and maintain a leyline network with magic circles capable of transmitting matter for pennies then I would count that as teleportation, yeah.
kstrauser 23 hours ago [-]
To a point, although you can't make your own kiln for free. The tools in those trades consume a significant amount of resources, where computing is basically free once you pay for the hardware. Something like GCC is the software equivalent of a steel mill. Even if you could design one and give out the designs for free, you'd still have to pay for the raw materials to construct one.
wlesieutre 23 hours ago [-]
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.
reaperducer 23 hours ago [-]
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.
We're talking about a macOS program, where companies don't have to bother with Apple's rules to sell their software, so your comment is off-topic.
Panic is good example of this kind of pricing.
Nova is $99 (last I checked), and gets updates for a year. After that, it's $75 for another year of updates.
If you don't want to update, you don't have to. You can even update every second or third year or whatever you want and catch up with all the missing features and updates.
Let's not just throw up our hands and say, "Oh, well. Apple makes me do this, so there's nothing I can do." Innovate.
ChrisMarshallNY 9 hours ago [-]
BBEdit did release through the Apple Store, for a while, but it didn’t work out.
The app is most useful, when you can point it at any file in the system, and sandboxed apps can’t see certain directories.
This resulted in an awkward “two-tiered” approach, for a short time, then BareBones just abandoned the App Store.
saispas 5 hours ago [-]
BBEdit is still in the App Store – you can download Version 16 today if you want.
If you buy it that way, then there is a single setting which authorises access to the sandboxed directories.
ChrisMarshallNY 5 hours ago [-]
Hey, that’s cool. I’m glad they figured it out.
They don’t mention it on the site, though, so I guess they aren’t eager to share their money with Apple.
Thanks!
saispas 4 hours ago [-]
There's a 'Mac App Store' FAQ on the support page, but you're right, it's given undue prominence elsewhere ;-)
wlesieutre 23 hours ago [-]
I don’t think subscriptions for every single thing would have taken off the way it did if it hadn’t been for Apple forcing it on mobile where normal people use the most software. I do support software that isn’t subscription as much as I can. Alibre 3D is another good one, though not on Mac yet.
conductr 23 hours ago [-]
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.
bayindirh 22 hours ago [-]
Plus, BBEdit has a heritage and extremely well rounded and polished codebase. They would not betray their stable business, quality and heritage for some short term gain.
They are building a good product for the fun of it and making good money out of it, which they deserve squarely.
kennywinker 24 hours ago [-]
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.
bellowsgulch 23 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I think I know their business, too. Remember 12 years ago when BBEdit left the Mac App Store only later to come back with subscriptions? Boo.
The app store doesn’t allow for any kind of upgrade pricing, so offering a subscription allows them to operate in the app store sustainably. A shitty compromise, but i don’t blame them for making. 12 years later you can still buy without subscribing - which is what counts for me
kstrauser 23 hours ago [-]
Eh. I think that was a fine thing to offer for people who wanted it. You can still buy a perpetual license for the full version from their website.
alwillis 21 hours ago [-]
> 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%.
browningstreet 24 hours ago [-]
Customer acquisition and retention is so very hard and expensive. It’s a tough equation.
factorialboy 1 days ago [-]
The pie (market) has also vastly expanded since 1998. Need to factor that, and not just inflation.
sedatk 1 days ago [-]
Proportionally, competition has vastly expanded too.
kennywinker 24 hours ago [-]
I assumed that was implied pretty heavily by what I said. Either they were overcharging in 1998, or the market got bigger.
vl 23 hours ago [-]
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.
account42 9 hours ago [-]
It's only natural for products where the marginal cost to produce is zero to get cheaper as the market expands.
NSUserDefaults 22 hours ago [-]
The landscape has changed significantly. In 2007, OS X itself (10.5 Leopard) cost $129.
01100011 15 hours ago [-]
I wish SlickEdit would take the hint...
ChrisMarshallNY 23 hours ago [-]
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.
e28eta 19 hours ago [-]
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.
LeoPanthera 1 days ago [-]
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.
wwalexander 5 hours ago [-]
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!
simondotau 22 hours ago [-]
The built-in TextEdit (in plain text mode) is also a perfectly cromulent minimum viable text editor.
krackers 19 hours ago [-]
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).
Not 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.
classichasclass 1 days ago [-]
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.
Cassell 1 days ago [-]
TextWrangler!
sigzero 1 days ago [-]
Same. Recently moved to Windows (blah) but if I move back, that's a purchase for me.
kstrauser 1 days ago [-]
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.
skydhash 24 hours ago [-]
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.
kstrauser 24 hours ago [-]
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.
skydhash 24 hours ago [-]
I won’t disagree with that, but my daily driver is OpenBSD. Emacs is what I got ;)
kstrauser 23 hours ago [-]
Right 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...
chipotle_coyote 22 hours ago [-]
I admit I have recently moved, on my Mac, from BBEdit to Emacs for most things, although Emacs has also taken over from Ulysses and Day One for me. But there are still some things that I end up doing in BBEdit, because it's kind of a multitool for text manipulation that, unlike Emacs, exposes its power very easily. As much as I'm growing to love Emacs, there's something to be said for an editor that doesn't answer so many questions with "write a little Lisp".
jeffrallen 22 hours ago [-]
Me neither. But I will speak evil of evil-mode. That's just plain evil.
darkteflon 12 hours ago [-]
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?
presbyterian 4 hours ago [-]
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.
kstrauser 5 hours ago [-]
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.
KenSF 1 days ago [-]
It still doesn't suck.
f30e3dfed1c9 13 hours 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.
_HMCB_ 1 days ago [-]
Love to see this app trending on HN.
suobset 17 hours ago [-]
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.
headwayoldest 1 days ago [-]
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.
sharkjacobs 1 days ago [-]
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.
kstrauser 1 days ago [-]
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.
If they add one word, “Legacy“, under the product name, I would likely be adequately warned.
Barebones is great!
debugnik 1 days 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 24 hours ago [-]
Yes, 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.
dchest 20 hours ago [-]
> 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.
That's not true, it became available in all NSTextViews by default, although with a bit different look.
kstrauser 19 hours ago [-]
I’m not talking about Writing Tools but being able to run chat queries to do things, ala OmniFocus. I could see Yojimbo using features like “summarize all the docs in this folder” or “suggest the right tags for this”. It can’t take advantage of those built-in features.
dchest 7 hours ago [-]
Well, obviously, software can't do things that the author didn't write code for. But AppKit components do get updated with some new features even if the original software didn't have support for them originally.
debugnik 23 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the examples. I simply wasn't expecting the features you originally listed to require application support, I see they're more involved that I imagined.
kstrauser 23 hours ago [-]
You bet. Even with things like iCloud, any old app can store a file in iCloud Drive just like any other folder on the computer, but apps have to use the CloudKit SDK to use more advanced sync features. It keeps getting updated annually, so apps using an older CloudKit can't use features that've been added since then.
gullevek 10 hours ago [-]
Great and amazing software.
And still no multiple cursor support :|
steviedotboston 1 days ago [-]
Love BBEdit!
nsonha 7 hours ago [-]
A classic "native" software with its clunky UI, "conventional" MacOS.
davedigerati 19 hours ago [-]
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
jfb 1 days ago [-]
I wonder if it will ever get emacs tabs.
marcelox86 1 days ago [-]
I use emacs but I don't know what you're referring to. Can you enlighten me please
jfb 19 hours ago [-]
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.
saispas 5 hours ago [-]
As 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?
k33n 1 days ago [-]
I think maybe he meant chords.
gnerd00 1 days ago [-]
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..
latchkey 24 hours ago [-]
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
throwaway613746 1 days ago [-]
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ConanRus 20 hours ago [-]
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submeta 1 days ago [-]
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.
kstrauser 23 hours ago [-]
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.
alwillis 20 hours ago [-]
BBEdit has had support for Claude, OpenAI and Ollama (or any OpenAI-compatible LLM) in their AI Chat Sheets feature [1].
> 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.
alwillis 20 hours ago [-]
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.
dizhn 1 days ago [-]
You can search for text within images.
ndegruchy 23 hours ago [-]
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.
f30e3dfed1c9 6 hours ago [-]
Honestly, I would have preferred the ability to search within PDF files.
Rendered at 19:55:14 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
I, in fact, do NOT want continuous maintenance. Ever. I will literally never turn on auto-updates for the rest of my life.
People use them because the products were good or industry standard. They don't prefer them because subscriptions somehow magically enabled them to be better.
They already preferred them over alternatives before subscriptions. If anything, people often complain that they got shittier after the subscription was introduced, once many are onboard and captive.
And people use their subscription versions because a non-subscription version is not made available anymore. The real comparison of what users prefer wouldn't be "X subscription software vs Y non-subscription". It would be "X subscription or X non-subscription".
Open source needs updates too, but somehow we take that for granted.
It puts the incentives on the wrong spot too. They are no longer incentivized to make shit appealing enough to upgrade.
But I think it's not the case incentives are wrong but the reality of business - what do you do when things are feature complete in all the ways that matter?
I haven't used a Mac in a bit but I remember liking BBEdit back in the 00s, and it still seems to exist without having a subscription model.
This is a sane AND a sustainable model for companies, and actually creates MORE incentives for the developers to align with the user's interest: if the new update sucks and has features no one asked for, then nobody will pay for the new version and keep the old one.
There is no reason why previous versions of the software you paid a license for should effectively "disappear".
I’ve appreciated that in a few apps where my need for them on a daily basis evaporated but I still need to briefly touch that system once every few months.
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.
1) Purchase a major version and get no updates.
2) Purchase a subscription and get constant updates.
Pay for the major version, get all of its updates. Then pay for update (to next major plus its updates) with a discount.
If you don't prefer the pay, you can keep what you have.
This is what Reaper, Forklift, CameraBag and countless others do, and it works very well.
Edit: This comment contained Forklift as an example before, but they have changed their model, so it's removed.
Let me update the comment.
Choices!
As a customer, so many frustrating things boil down to not being given a choice. Not even having a tickbox to express which way you'd like it even if the default is otherwise.
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.
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.
Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.
Where is this mythical no cost software you're talking about? Is it in the room with us right now?
Where does your income come from again? Is it this same zero cost software we're talking about right now? The same zero cost software that an employer pays you a salary and benefits for, or...?
Yeah, but takes nation-state amounts of money to bring new medical devices to market.
> Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.
Buy a laptop, Linux, self, Linux, Linux, Linux. There, zero cost for an individual person to write software on the laptop they already owned for other reasons.
Put another way, my kid can sit down at their computer and write a web browser without paying a single additional penny.
I don't owe it to anyone to pay them money instead of writing an equivalent version myself. I choose to pay some vendors money because they've done nice work and I'd rather slip them cash than spend the time to re-invent their particular wheel. That's the category BBEdit's in for me and why I buy their apps. But I don't have to. And yes, I give away literally 100% of my off-work software for anyone else to use who wants to. I wrote those things with free tools for free languages to run on free operating systems, so why not give back? I have a day job to put food on the table. My hobby projects are entirely in the FOSS world that you seem to have forgotten exists.
Blacksmithing, metal working?
We're talking about a macOS program, where companies don't have to bother with Apple's rules to sell their software, so your comment is off-topic.
Panic is good example of this kind of pricing.
Nova is $99 (last I checked), and gets updates for a year. After that, it's $75 for another year of updates.
If you don't want to update, you don't have to. You can even update every second or third year or whatever you want and catch up with all the missing features and updates.
Let's not just throw up our hands and say, "Oh, well. Apple makes me do this, so there's nothing I can do." Innovate.
The app is most useful, when you can point it at any file in the system, and sandboxed apps can’t see certain directories.
This resulted in an awkward “two-tiered” approach, for a short time, then BareBones just abandoned the App Store.
If you buy it that way, then there is a single setting which authorises access to the sandboxed directories.
They don’t mention it on the site, though, so I guess they aren’t eager to share their money with Apple.
Thanks!
They are building a good product for the fun of it and making good money out of it, which they deserve squarely.
[1]: https://x.com/smorr/status/521033038713880576
[2]: https://www.barebones.com/company/press/bbedit_back_to_mas_p...
For hobbyists with revenue less than $1 million per year, the App Store commission is 15%.
Siegel still manages it (I don't know if he is still the main coder). He never sold out.
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.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/TextE...
Another nice thing is the ability to collect paths, line and column numbers from the output for navigation.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Barebones is great!
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?
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.
That's not true, it became available in all NSTextViews by default, although with a bit different look.
And still no multiple cursor support :|
much love for them sticking with it for so long
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.
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.
[1]: https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/bbedit15.html#:~:t...
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.
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.