What is BBEdit used for?

BBEdit is a macOS text, HTML and code editor from Bare Bones Software for writers, web authors and software developers. It is a good fit for writing and editing plain text on a Mac, hand-coding HTML and web pages, and cleaning and transforming textual data.

Yes. BBEdit has a free plan. Commercial editor with a 30-day evaluation and a free mode; licenses are sold through the vendor's store.

Is BBEdit open source?

No. BBEdit is proprietary (closed-source) software. Open-source alternatives to BBEdit include Zed, Visual Studio Code and Neovim.

What are some alternatives to BBEdit?

BBEdit competes with Sublime Text, Nova and Cursor. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source BBEdit alternatives.

BBEdit: features, pricing and alternatives

About BBEdit

BBEdit is a commercial text editor for macOS from Bare Bones Software. It is aimed at three groups: writers, people who build websites, and software developers who need to edit prose, source code and other textual data.

The product page describes tools for editing, searching and manipulating text, with version 16 being the current release shown. The company site also lists related Mac products, such as Yojimbo and the retired TextWrangler, along with licensing information including multi-user licenses and a Mac App Store option. Only a limited portion of the product description was available for this entry, so detailed capabilities are not listed.

BBEdit is proprietary software. The vendor offers a 30-day evaluation period and mentions a free mode that continues after it ends, and a full license can be bought from its store.

Key features

Text and HTML editing on macOS
Source code editing for developers
Advanced search and text manipulation
Suited to prose and textual data
Free mode after a 30-day evaluation

Good fit for

→Writing and editing plain text on a Mac
→Hand-coding HTML and web pages
→Cleaning and transforming textual data

Tags: text-editor; macos; html; code-editor; markup; writing; bare-bones

BBEdit: questions and answers

What is BBEdit used for?: BBEdit is a macOS text, HTML and code editor from Bare Bones Software for writers, web authors and software developers. It is a good fit for writing and editing plain text on a Mac, hand-coding HTML and web pages, and cleaning and transforming textual data.
Is BBEdit free?: Yes. BBEdit has a free plan. Commercial editor with a 30-day evaluation and a free mode; licenses are sold through the vendor's store.
Is BBEdit open source?: No. BBEdit is proprietary (closed-source) software. Open-source alternatives to BBEdit include Zed, Visual Studio Code and Neovim.
What are some alternatives to BBEdit?: BBEdit competes with Sublime Text, Nova and Cursor. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source BBEdit alternatives.