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 This will resolve any functional issues caused by bugs and regressions in out-of-date versions of the OS.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 bug in which file-relative URL addressing (in Edit Markup and elsewhere) wasn’t applied correctly in cases where a site settings context wasn’t available.
Made changes to significantly improve performance when reading in large files.
Made changes to improve the overall experience when opening the “License” panel in App Store builds.
Fixed bug in which the application would not reliably retrieve App Store purchase status in some situations, and “Restore Purchases” would wait forever for something that was never going to happen.
The license panel in Mac App Store versions gains a link in the descriptive text to redeem an offer code, if you have one. This is also available in the subscription-purchase panel, via “Redeem Offer Code”.
Documents opened from disk (whether from the Finder, the
bbedit command-line tool, or any other means that doesn’t
request a specific window) will once again open into the window
of the frontmost project that contains the document’s file, even
when “Open documents into the front window when possible” is
turned off in the Application preferences. If you would rather
that such documents always open into new windows when the above
setting is turned off, use the expert preference:
defaults write com.barebones.bbedit OpenDocumentsIntoContainingProject -bool NO
Fixed misplacement of the insertion point after choosing an LSP
completion whose edit extends past the insertion point, e.g.
clangd’s #include path completions.
Fixed a performance problem in which Project windows containing items whose backing files had been deleted would repeatedly attempt expensive file-location lookups while drawing the file list; on recent versions of macOS this could cause application-wide typing lag for as long as the files remained missing.
Fixed bug in which keyboard events that arrived while waiting for the Xcode integration script to run when the Open File by Name window was invoked would end up going into the document that was active at the time, rather than into the Open File by Name window’s search box.
Fixed a bug in which the “Document Backups” command on the application’s “Folders” submenu would beep instead of revealing the backups folder if a “BBEdit Backups” folder existed on iCloud Drive or in the Dropbox folder. This also restores the documented behavior in which an existing “BBEdit Backups” folder on iCloud Drive (or in the Dropbox folder) is once again used for making document backups.
Worked around security behavior in Safari which prevented it from displaying previews of untitled (never-saved) documents.
Fixed a memory-usage issue that arose during code review when certain literal-text search optimizations were in use.
Corrected link to “Manage Subscription” in the App Store build.
Fixed cases in which certain unexpected transaction states could result in incorrect license status reported in App Store builds.