BBEdit 16.0 is a major upgrade, which includes significant new features; visible changes to existing features; and fixes for reported issues.
Because BBEdit 16 builds on features that were added during the BBEdit 15 cycle (as well as previous versions), please take a few moments to browse the release notes archive and review the release notes for any versions that you may not have seen.
To get a high-level overview of what’s new in BBEdit 16, with screen shots, see the What’s New in BBEdit 16 page.
For a comprehensive list of the changes introduced in BBEdit 16.0, please see the BBEdit 16.0 change notes.
For detailed information on using any of BBEdit’s features, please refer to the user manual (choose “User Manual” from BBEdit’s Help menu).
BBEdit 16 requires macOS 14.0 or later.
For whichever version of macOS you are using, please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version. This will resolve any functional issues caused by bugs and regressions in out-of-date versions of the OS.
If you have been using any previous version of BBEdit in Free Mode, starting BBEdit 16.0 will reset your 30-day evaluation period, so that you can have a full trial of the new features.
If you have previously purchased a license from us for BBEdit 15 or older, you will have a full 30-day evaluation period in which to try out BBEdit 16’s new features. License upgrades are available at a discount for existing customers, and some customers may be eligible for a free upgrade (based on date of purchase). Please see the BBEdit upgrades page for information and instructions.
Fixed crash or other misbehavior which would occur when an SFTP connection failed due to host key mismatch, port number misuse (pro tip: port 21 is for FTP, port 22 is for SFTP, and FTP and SFTP are not related in any way other than sharing three letters), or other exceptional conditions.
Corrected a behavior regression in which new documents could be created in the active project/instaproject, rather than in a new window or in the first available non-project window (depending on settings).
Fixed bug in which global disablement of LSP semantic token coloring wasn’t respected.
Fixed bug in which Prefix/Suffix Lines mishandled partial-line selection ranges.
Allow Command-delete as a synonym for “Don’t Save” in the “do you want to save changes to this document” close alert.
Fixed crash that would occur when closing the Find window in the (very short) time interval during which it was waiting to update live match state.
Fixed crash that would occur when closing a document at the same time a clock change, time zone change, or day change notification was received in the application.
Fixed crash which could be caused by immediately closing an FTP browser or project window immediately (in a very narrow time window) after opening it.
Made a change to address a rare reported crash.
Made a change to address a reported sporadic crash which would occur when loading a file.
Made changes to resolve a potential race condition that could cause the minimap to crash sporadically.
Fixed a potential crash which could occur while quitting, when an open window was blocked by a window-modal sheet.
Fixed an obscure crash which could occur if a document was closed while waiting for the application to finish restoring its soft wrap and selection state (if it had been soft wrapped).
Fixed crash that would occur while checking links in a file and the project site settings didn’t specify a server URL or directory.
Function scanning in codeless language modules once again considers text in comments; this had changed (intentionally) for 16.0, but there were unintended consequences for some language module developers.
Improved reporting of Git merge conflicts in the working copy status.
Fixed bug in which site deployment would silently do nothing if the local content root wasn’t in a Git repository.
Fixed an ancient lurking horror involving leading slashes in SFTP server paths.
Fixed a bug in which certain character sequences in
DefaultKeyBindings.dict weren’t interpreted correctly.
Corrected several behaviors in vi emulation involving Visual
mode and word-oriented editing. Visual e now extends the
selection through the final character of the word; iw is now
recognized for inner-word selections and operator commands such
as viw, diw, and ciw; and s now substitutes the current
character or selection and enters Insert mode.
Fixed misplacement of the insertion point after zero-length LSP edits occurring during certain completions.
Made a change to prevent a race deadlock when checking the modification date of a remote file before saving it.
Fix a crash which could occur in the Find window when dismissing it via a Return key in the search text box, and an error (such as a malformed Grep pattern) occurred in the process.
Fixed insertion point misplacement when using G in vi mode
in soft wrapped documents.
Made a change to resolve a Shell Worksheet behavior issue when sending very large command strings to the shell.
Fixed regression in which the legacy “Keyword Pattern” codeless language module key was not loaded or validated.
Corrected title of the “Show in Finder” entry in the Menus & Shortcuts settings.
Fixed regression in which Unix shell script coloring would get confused by things that looked like they might have been regular expressions, but weren’t.
Corrected behavior of line-oriented commands in vi mode.
Corrected misbehavior of counted dd, cc, and yy in vi
mode, in which the range of lines affected always started at BOF.
Implemented { and } for paragraph movement in vi mode.
Corrected the font attributes returned by requests from the accessibility API to include a correct specification of the font, as well as the prevailing foreground color.
Corrected calculations for text range boundaries requested via the accessibility API when Soft Wrap Text was turned on.
Return the actual effective font size via the accessibility API, rather than relying on the client to determine magnification.
Corrected behavior of o/O in vi mode.
Fixed bug in which blockquote markers were not colored correctly for successive blockquote runs in Markdown documents.
Corrected handling of unexpected response block types in Anthropic API responses.
Improved correctness of vi word motion and insertion placement when exiting visual mode.
Removed the vestigial “Remove” item from the context menu in the custom language settings list.
Corrected selection/cursor behavior when using t and friends
in vi mode.
Corrected coloring while editing in files backed by some codeless language modules.
Corrected behavior of a in vi mode when used at end-of-line.
Corrected behavior of screen-movement keys in vi mode.
Corrected appearance of the “exchange find and replace field contents” button in the Find and Multi-File Search windows when running on macOS 14.