BBEdit Comparison Chart

What’s the difference between BBEdit and TextWrangler? See for yourself! Highlighted rows indicate features which are exclusive to BBEdit.

Note: This chart used to include features from BBEdit Lite 6.1. However, BBEdit Lite has been discontinued for a long time: if you’re still using it, you really should upgrade to TextWrangler. Like BBEdit Lite, TextWrangler doesn’t cost anything, and in all respects it’s a much more modern and capable application.

This chart is not an exhaustive listing of the features in BBEdit. You’ll find an overview in the BBEdit Feature Tour.

TextWrangler 4 BBEdit 10
Optimized for Intel Macs (requires Mac OS X 10.6 or later) • •
Multiple Undo • •
Multiple Clipboards • •
Splittable editing windows • •
Extensively configurable key equivalents • •
Show and hide individual menu items or entire menus • •
Transparently reads and writes DOS, Unix, and Mac files • •
Transparently reads and writes gzip (.gz) and BZ2 (.bz2) compressed files • •
Transparently reads and writes files stored within Zip compressed archives   •
Powerful multi-file search and replace (even on files that aren’t open) with multiple simultaneous search and replace operations • •
Automatic backup of files when saving (optional) • •
“Quit” command saves the application’s state (including the contents of untitled or unsaved documents) and quits instantly; and picks up where you left off the next time you start up • •
Periodic auto-save to protect against data loss from system crashes, power failures, and locust infestations • •
Complete set of HTML Tools for fast, easy, and correct markup. Supports current standards including HTML5, HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, and XHTML 1.1.

  • HTML Tools accessible from menu or floating palette

  • Innovative “Edit Markup” panel helps you write correct markup according to the standard in use

  • Context-sensitive tag and attribute completion while typing

  • Apply HTML markup from contextual (right-click) menus, or use built-in contextually aware completion for tags and attributes

  • Standards-based document and site syntax checking—check single pages or entire sites for compliance

  • Preview in BBEdit—automatically updates a preview as you edit, or preview in any installed browser

  • Built-in web-server support allows you to preview dynamically generated HTML

  • Close Current Tag command speeds and simplifies HTML element creation and editing

  • Powerful include and placeholder options for easier site maintenance

  • Built-in Tidy support for code cleanup and accessibility checking

  • Configure multiple web site projects via the scriptable HTML Web Site preferences

  • Easily create file and image links with drag and drop

  • Comprehensive HTML Entities palette for easy insertion of Latin-1, Symbol, Greek Letters, and other special characters

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Flexible ‘grep’ style pattern-based search and replace based on PCRE (the Perl-Compatible Regular Expression library) • •
“Live Search” highlights matches in your document as you type a search string • •
Advanced PCRE support, including named subpatterns and other grep goodness • •
Comprehensive AppleScript support: scriptable, recordable, and attachable • •
Built-in file and folder comparison with Find Differences • •
Find Differences displays word- and character-level differences • •
Rectangular/columnar text selections • •
Open, edit, and save files in a wide variety of character sets (including UTF-8 and UTF-16) • •
Automatic source-code language guessing • •
Can be used as an external editor for Xcode • •
Unix command-line access for opening and comparing files (Note: Not available from the Mac App Store.) • •
bbfind/twfind command-line tool provides integration of multi-file search with Unix scripts and workflows • •
Authenticated saves (Note: Not available from the Mac App Store.) • •
Emacs key-binding support • •
Offers the Scratchpad, a convenient place to make quick notes and temporarily store text without having to create a document on disk   •
Includes a copy of Consolas Regular, an excellent antialiased code editing font; licensed from Ascender Corporation for use only with BBEdit.   •
Extensive FTP and SFTP support

  • Open and save text files located on remote FTP/SFTP servers

  • Supports Mac OS X Keychain and use of alternate ports

  • FTP/SFTP Browser provides persistent view of remote site directories

  • Bonjour discovery of local servers

 • •
Integrated support for file transfers through Interarchy, Transmit, Fetch, and other third-party clients with “Edit in BBEdit” commands • •
Open files and view directory listings with Disk Browser • •
Disk Browser features hierarchical folder listing and file filters for advanced control • •
Explore contents of Unix tar and Zip archive files in disk browsers without needing to extract them first • •
Function-navigation and syntax-coloring support for more than 20 programming languages, including HTML, JavaScript, Java, Perl, C++, Objective-C, & more • •
Function-navigation and syntax-coloring support for Ruby, object-oriented JavaScript, and SQL • •
Loads and saves color schemes (using the bbcolors format) • •
Text completion, using ctags, clippings, document symbols, and language keywords as data sources   •
Control editor behavior and display settings on a per-language basis • •
Code folding • •
Powerful Clippings system:

  • Store and insert frequently used text items and custom tags

  • Menu-driven and key-bindable item selection

  • Language-sensitive switching of clipping sets

  • Useful example sets included

  • Download additional sets from our web site for free

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Run Unix scripts and filters (including Perl, Python, Ruby, and shell script) from a built-in menu • •
Native Mac OS X spelling checker • •
Check spelling as you type to catch embarrassing typos • •
Integrated support for Subversion and Perforce version control systems; work with source files from multiple repositories   •
Shell worksheets run Unix commands from an editable window (just like MPW worksheets, for you old-timers)   •
Use BBEdit’s legendary text processing power in any Automator workflow   •
Use Automator workflows as “text filters” for transforming document contents   •
Create and run Text Factories—apply any number of powerful text transformations to multiple files without programming   •
Combine text factories, scripts, text filters, and Automator workflows into “packages” for easy distribution and installation   •
Open multiple documents per window:

  • Each window presents a list of all of the documents that are open in that window

  • Navigation Bar contains a popup menu with a list of all of the documents open in the window

  • Previous Document and Next Document commands speed navigation using keyboard, menu, or mouse

 • •
Ponies   •
Create Codeless Language Modules to add syntax coloring and function navigation for additional languages without writing any code • •
Support for Exuberant Ctags (a powerful tool for indexing and navigating source code), providing easy access to indexed symbols by means of contextual (right-click) menus and the Find Definition command   •
Use Projects to organize your projects, grouping files into a single browser without regard to their location   •
Comprehensive PDF user manual provided • •
Price — US$49.99
Discounted upgrade pricing from previous BBEdit versions (not available) US$39.99