BBEdit Comparison Chart

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

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

TextWrangler 5 BBEdit 11
Requires Mac OS X 10.8.5 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 • •
Search for and extract text into a new document from a single document, or multiple files and folders   •
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

  • 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

  • Configure web site projects for “one-click” deployment via FTP or SFTP

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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 • •
Advanced single-window Find Differences presentation • •
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 • •
Instantly highlight and navigate occurrences of an indicated word (or selected text) in the active document • •
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 use of alternate ports

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

  • Bonjour discovery of local servers

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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 • •
Built-in support for editing Markdown, including syntax coloring and navigation • •
Live preview Markdown documents without leaving the application   •
Enhanced coloring options, including factory-supplied color schemes • •
Loads and saves color schemes (including import from 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 • •
Built-in EditorConfig support to control editor behavior and settings within a working copy • •
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 Git, 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

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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 Free US$49.99
Discounted upgrade pricing from previous BBEdit versions — (info)

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.