It looks like the occasion is the 30th anniversary of Bare Bones Software (the company): <https://www.barebones.com/company/>. Perhaps the original submitter mistakenly interpreted the "30th Anniversary special pricing” text as applying to the BBEdit program itself.
The new title now seems inaccurate, or not reflecting the intention, given that, and given that the linked page says "30th Anniversary special pricing! Use the coupon code “BBEDIT30” at checkout to get BBEdit for US$30 for a limited time."
The situation is confusing because of a little bit of history.
BBEdit was 30 years old last year because it really was around in 1992, but it wasn’t commercially available. It was basically Rich Siegel and his friends. 1993 is when it became commercially available at version 2.5.
This doesn't say when exactly Bare Bones Software was founded.
The anniversary celebrated was the commercial version of BBEdit released on May 11, 1993. Not the anniversary of the company. Not the anniversary of the the non-commercial version.
Sigh. I don't really understand why you're having such trouble with this?
"BBEdit is 30 years old as a commercial product"
"30th anniversary of BBEdit as a commercial product"
"Bare Bones Software released the first commercial version of BBEdit 30 years ago"
Plenty of fine, accurate, straightforward titles to choose from, yet you keep doing weird, misleading stuff with it.
In fact, the original submitted title was fine, and clear enough.
It's apparently true that there was a free version of BBEdit released on April 12, 1992. But that is not what is being celebrated now. It's largely irrelevant. Rather, it's the non-free version released on May 11, 1993. That's why there's "30th Anniversary special pricing" of $30 with coupon code “BBEDIT30”.
30, not 31.
BBEdit, not Bare Bones Software (the exact anniversary of which is unknown).
My late `09 Mac Mini blew up a few years ago. I had a spare one a friend gave me that I fired up and when I sent an email to the BBEDit folks asking if could download and unlock that version they gave it to me without any hesitation. All they asked for was my email address. Same with the folks at "Fetch".
Adobe basically told to piss off when I asked for a copy of the version of Photoshop I'd paid for. I downloaded a version of Pixelmator for free instead and haven't given Adobe a nickel since, and I won't ever buy anything from them again.
Long LOOOONG ago, I had a good relationship with Adobe. For instance, I was one of the beta-testers for Photoshop 3.0 (which was the first to do native CMYK). Would talk with them all the time over the phone.
But those guys have long since left the company and the "bean counters" took over the company and it has been downhill ever since. I too will never give them another dime. I don't mind their products, I just can't abide the management and company.
I've had the same experience as you did with BareBones though. They always came through for me with BBEdit. I told them one time they have a customer for life, and I've kept that promise.
I caved and purchased a license of Fetch some 3 years ago after shamelessly pirating it for something like 15 years. It's such a fantastically simple piece of software and really filled the void WS_FTP created when I swapped from Windows to Mac.
When it came time recently to start from scratch when I purchased a new (used) MacBook Pro, I finally just caved on the license.
One of those I told myself I'd 'purchase when I had the money eventually' and actually did, heh. Zero regrets.
I can remember emailing Ambrosia Software in the late 90's and having to tell them what my email address had been when I purchased license keys. They didn't give me any trouble at all.
Companies with solid products and solid support really stand out.
I, too, have been using this delightful editor since the early 1990's -- once known as TextWrangler. Still going strong!
Their mission statement is spot on:
We don’t have investors to impress, so we don’t need a “mission statement.”
We enjoy writing and shipping great products
that address the needs of ourselves and our customers.
I've been using BBEdit since college and I love it. I was and is my primary text editor for all of my development (except Java and Swift which basically require an IDE).
Also, it's funny: I am only marginally older than BBEdit. I can't imagine running a software project for so long, let alone so successfully.
I’d be really interested in reading a history of the codebase: from classic Mac Toolbox to whatever it looks like today. Is it still mostly C? A weird mishmash of C, C++, Obj-C, and Swift? What UI toolkit does it use?
Looks like Objective-C, C++, AppKit, some other bits and pieces. QuartzCore has Core Animation in it which can either be used to create flashy animations or be used to create some very solid, high-performance text views (if that’s how you use it).
I believe it's still mostly C, and it definitely uses some custom text field stuff. If it were using the Cocoa textfield it would have smooth scrolling, but BBEdit still retains line-by-line scrolling.
BBEdit can (and always could) read text files significantly larger than RAM without thrashing VM. This has always required a custom text engine, first because it was the only way to do that, and more recently I assume it still provides highest performance.
When it started, the native text editing on the Mac was limited to 32K chunks! Need anything more, you could start with the raw APIs that lay out a single line of text and do it by hand.
Love BBEdit, but you can also get Rich to fix your KitchenAid Stand Mixer. (No joke) Must be an interesting story on how this second career came about.
As a programmer who has used BBEdit for most of its history, and as the owner of a coffee house/bakery with various KitchenAid mixers.
The Pro Models come with excellent warranties, which I have used several times over the years.
And I have done many repairs myself, using my mechanical knowledge and diagrams from replacement parts sellers
But this site is fantastic. I have already learned much. And I have a machine on my work bench that I known needs repairs that will be much helped by Rich’s site.
If you believe in the right to repair, and you see in the market for a mixer. These KitchenAid models are for you.
I started programming on Macs in the early 90s, and I used BBEdit the entire time that I was on the platform. I no longer work on Macs, but I would love to see a Linux version. Never going to happen, but it's one of the few pieces of software that I still miss.
I believe you can create a TTF font with embedded bitmaps in it. At the specific size, it should use the bitmap font. At other sizes ... , well, don't do that.
I read about BBEdit on HN a few months ago and realized it has one use-case where it excels: text transformation and regex search/replace across files. When it comes to this, no other editor I know can hold water: neither Sublime, nor VS Code, nor Vim. And forget about Emacs, as regexes need to be awkwardly double or triple backslashed.
Text transformations can be done via regex, predefined functions, or any scripting language, where the scripts will be listed in the menu.
Regex search/replace has a history of used patterns, so you can reuse them.
All in all, it is a very lightweight editor with excellent text transformation features that no other editor can offer.
I use VS Code for coding, Emacs as a Lisp machine and its macro recorder for repetitive tasks, and BBEdit for all other text transformation tasks.
This is why BBEdit is still my absolute go-to as a technical writer. I’ve found other editors that are prettier, but it’s just so darn good at text manipulation it’s hard to believe.
While I drifted away from BBEdit for coding a while ago, BBEdit 14’s LSP support has pulled me back to some degree. I put together a decent Elixir package for it and, to my own mild surprise, like it more than Panic Nova or Doom Emacs. (Nova has tremendous potential, but it feels like it’s still tripping over its own shoelaces a little too often.)
Notepad++ has a decent interface for that, I assume BBEdit did it first.
I'd be surprised if vim couldn't do it as a command. After doing a search, what did surprise me was Vim having it's own Fandom wiki. Maybe extreme Vim commanding will be the next popular livestreaming topic.
That was the killer BBEdit feature for me, back when I was building my first static web sites. Making precise global layout changes without using a web template system felt like magic.
BBEdit was one of the best apps on my very first Mac in 1995, and I've been using it ever since. No other software I use has more years of service under its belt. 68k, PowerPC, Intel, ... — that alone is such a rare achievement. I don't know any other commercial software with such a track record.
They will pry it from my cold, dead hands once I'm gone.
A couple days ago I started thinking that VS Code had slowly morphed into something that was starting to feel bloated. I took a look at Sublime, which I once loved, but the customization to make it look like I wanted seemed like too much. Maybe I’ll give BBEdit a try; I don’t think I’ve ever used it.
I get lost every now and then trying out all the code editors on the market. My current usage in order Webstorm, VSCode, Sublime Text. For a long time I only used SciTE.
I believe it is Bare Bones Software (the company) that is having its 30th anniversary this month <https://www.barebones.com/company/>, rather than BBEdit (the program).
Nova (née Coda) has been steadily improving and is now a truly pristine mac-ass mac app. It has allowed me to figure out how Git works, how to properly set-up a Linux web server, and most of all has raised my programming abilities.
I was a longtime Coda user in the late 00's early 10's. Moved away to IntelliJ for several years. Recently rediscovered Nova after IntelliJ introduced some memory leak that makes system performance unbearable.
Nova is using, btw, 1/4 the RAM that IntelliJ was using. In addition to looking pretty. And feeling responsive. And not crashing my Zoom calls.
BBEdit is one of the few apps I miss from the Mac world. ResEdit/Resourcerer are up there as well, being able to naively open up the resource fork and customize applications and sometimes make massive changes to them was great fun.
While I remember those times fondly and with great nostalgia, I think the Apple ecosystem of the system 7 days hindered my learning, it was just too easy. I could open up AppleScript and hit record, perform some actions and then naively change some things to variables and I would have my script. I could open up HyperCard and make a game just by guess and check. I could open up an app in RedEdit and start changing applications. I never had to actually learn anything. My parents bought me a programming book back in those days and I saw little point in making the computer say "Hello, World" and reading through a book when I already had so much power that was effortless to get.
But maybe I just did not see a need for applications beyond the ones I could already get so saw no need to learn to write applications from scratch or was more interested in exploring. Too long ago to remember my motives.
Hmmm... well, I got into it a bit earlier and so when I got to the Mac, I already had some programming experience in BASIC, Pascal, and assembly. So I used HyperCard, but I also learned how to write XFCN and XCMD code resources to add functionality to HyperCard. I used PostScript in the first LaserWriter, but also figured out how to connect it to a terminal and give it PostScript commands directly. I was motivated to teach myself as much as I could... probably in no small part because I was bored with my regular class material.
I've been using BBEdit since version 4. It is still the most useful app on my Mac after almost 30 years. If someone put a gun to my head and told me I could install only one app on my Mac, it would be BBEdit.
But BBEdit is so good and has been such a key part of my livelihood for decades that I gladly pay to upgrade every time a new major version comes out, even if I don't need any of the new features.
That's the way to keep revenue coming without subscription extortion: make something genuinely useful that people truly like using.
I’ve been using it for most of those years, and still use it every day. We recently had to wrangle a bunch of 400Mb+ XML files, and everyone else’s editor struggled even to open them, while I happily regexed my way around extracting various data.
However, I reluctantly have to say that when working with TypeScript codebases specifically, I do feel the lack of IDE features for recognizing imports and cross-referencing symbols across files. Any other BBEdit diehards in this position? What have you ended up doing?
>We recently had to wrangle a bunch of 400Mb+ XML files, and everyone else’s editor struggled even to open them, while I happily regexed my way around extracting various data
Way back with version 4 (I think), I used it to work on a CSV that was way larger than the amount of RAM I had in the computer. Amazingly responsive. Not that long ago I used it on some XML monstrosities that were pushing a gig in size. Still worked.
I still use it as my main environment today. Over the years you accumulate a variety of little snippets and scripts (in all sorts of languages, including AppleScript) and whatnot that help with your particular workflow. It's very much like a prettier, pointy-clickier version of Emacs in this way.
I really miss BareBones Mailsmith, which was like BBEdit for mail. In today's world where everybody uses HTML email (boo!), it wouldn't be so great, but man alive it was good.
I mainly edit in vim in a terminal, but when I feel like a GUI I used BBEdit.
I also use when I'm trying to understand someone else's code. I like its multi-file search better than anything else I've tried. When you do a multi-file search in BBEdit (or a single file search if you use the "Find All" command) it opens up a search results window split horizontally into two panes.
The top pane shows all the matching lines, grouped by file. You can collapse the matches for any given file.
When you select a line in the results pane an editor opens in the bottom pane for the file containing that line, with the cursor on that line. You can make changes if you want there or in the regular editing window that the file is in or both.
You can have multiple multi-file search results windows open. I might be looking at a function in a file, do a multi-file search to find all mentions of that, and then while looking at a caller in another file see something that needs changing, and start doing that right in the bottom pane of the results. While doing that I might need to check something else out, do a second search for that, see something that needs fixing there, and do that from that results window's bottom pane.
Use it as my main editor still, absolutely love it. Still gets updated a few times a year. Just find it more snappier to work with than webtech based editors and the shortcuts and workflows are all more native on MacOS than VSCode. Also a big fan of the mixed font/size/styling when working with Markdown docs.
Sublime Text 2 (its first cross-platform version) came on the scene around that time and I think drew away a lot of the crowd that had been waiting for TextMate 2.
TM 2 was great, albeit somewhat abandoned, until Apple Silicon came along. There’s some sort of bug in the app that makes it regularly hang on launch on my M1 and M1 Max laptops.
BBEdit is invaluable to me and I will use it forever. That said, it has some persistent window focus bugs that spill over into finder that I dearly I wish that they would iron out. Otherwise, it is one of the most stable, reliable, and useful pieces of software that I have ever touched.
However old it is exactly, I've used this editor for decades and I love it. Most recently, I use the Worksheet feature to execute a series of scripts that do all the file conversion and make the RSS feed entries for my podcasts. It's easier to understand than a Makefile (although I do use Makefiles to build my blog posts) and it's all archived; if I need to regenerate anything I can just scroll back and re-run the commands right from the Worksheet file.
I know the Worksheet concept wasn't invented by Bare Bones - I think they borrowed it from the original MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workshop), which used to be what the cool kids used to build Mac software before there were competing IDEs. But Bare Bones definitely perfected it.
Order won't complete (after Paypal payment confirmed) -- "you must accept terms and conditions" message shows up, but no checkbox or other way to accept T&Cs.
(Is the BB order website incompatible with Firefox on macOS, or failing due to load?)
Because there’s a bunch of Hackernews trying to mimic the superficial trappings of their tech heroes by using extremely obfuscated interfaces and they get extremely loud when they’re not catered to.
The risk in adding something like “`vi` keybindings” is that it’s never going to be enough for the people demanding it. They tend to always want more and deeper integration because oh, gee, this one particular bit of line noise is critical to my workflow! And this repeats until they’ve turned their target into `vi`.
If you want `vi` just use and extend `vi` and let the rest of us be. Personally, I only find it ergonomic when used with an HP 9000-300 HIL keyboard, which puts the escape key in an odd place, and with an ADM-3A because all of the design decisions the cargo-cult thinks are so ingenious are really just accommodations for that particular terminal’s inadequate keyboard. Hence why I use a Macintosh, and a Macintosh editor.
I love BBEdit and use it daily as my main text editor, and have since classic MacOS days! I'm hoping they add a couple of features:
- Ability to auto-format using Prettier.
- AI Large Language Model auto-complete for code. The field is moving fast, but I'd love to be able to use open models here. I don't want to send all my code to GitHub co-pilot.
BBedit has an excellent built in text-filter functionality and I've written scripts to send selected text as a prompt to various LLMs, but built-in would be ideal!
i've been using textmate and bbedit since college for notes, essay drafts, as a scratch pad, my first programming editor... everything! i still use it as a scratch pad and for random text/code editing (especially big regex-based changes) almost every day. i finally felt like a big-boy programmer when i'd earned enough to justify upgrading to the paid version and i hope it lasts another 30 years so others can find as much use in it as i have.
I switched to CotEditor a few years ago, but before that I used BBEdit starting from way back on System 6 on a Mac SE.
Definitely a great utility, but recently a bought the new version and just a few weeks later a new version was released that required me to buy it again. That soured me a bit on the company.
I really like CotEditor though. Fully native Mac app, works great.
If you bought a license and then "just a few weeks later a new version was released", then you were eligible for a free upgrade. And you can still get it; try writing to 'sales@barebones.com' and asking. (Odds are that your free upgrade email was sent and you didn't see it, or it got spam-filtered.)
I did email them, and I was offered a discount, but not a free upgrade. I was already checking out CotEditor at that point, however, and liked it, so I just stayed with that.
I am quite new to Mac world. Some time ago I looked around for a fast and free notetab-like application, similar to Notepad++ on Windows. Lot of people recommended BBEdit so I tried it and I'm quite happy with it. The only thing I cannot figure out is where is the "reopen all opened files on app restart" option.
Bought my first license of BBedit a few minutes ago (impulses I can't control).
I don't know yet what to to with it, but I will probably explore writing language modes for it. I used to do this for Sublime Text, but I think Sublime lost its Mojo at the point of not adding native support for language servers.
I remember attending an early 90s Mac users group at MIT where Rich came and demoed the then-new BBEdit, ran through the basic features, answered a few questions, and raffled off a license. A colleague won it. Glad to hear he's still at it.
I would buy a license, but it seems version 15 should be coming out soon based upon previous releases. Even with a 30% discount might be better to wait until the new release.
