BBE dit 12

This powerful text editor still doesn’t suck

$49.99 From Bare Bones, barebones.com Needs OS X 10.11 or later

BBEdit has been around so long, it’s almost part of the Mac’s furniture. Version 12 arrives 25 years after the original, which is some achievement. But a bigger achievement is that the app remains relevant, powerful, and efficient, and almost never frustrates.

Take BBEdit 12’s new themes. The app now defaults to black, to be “down with the kids.” But if you’re old and gray, you can stick with the old and gray theme; when you upgrade BBEdit, it won’t touch your existing setup.

But there’s more to BBEdit 12 than a re-skin. New features include improvements to the FTP view (you can now open/close folders), the ability to paste using a text filter (which offers loads of possibilities if the filter’s a script), and support for Split View.

The last of these works nicely with the newly integrated WebKit inspector. When editing Markdown, you can have your .md document on the left and a preview on the right, with the inspector below. We think iA Writer’s own Split View remains superior for streamlined writing, but BBEdit’s changes are welcome for serious editing. Our favorite new features, though, are Columns Editing and Canonize. Columns Editing is for comma- and tab-delimited text files. Within BBEdit, you can copy one or more selected columns to a new document, or rearrange columns without doing a copy-paste dance with a spreadsheet app. The appearance is resolutely plain text — you get no sorting or styling niceties, but then that’s what Numbers and Excel are for.

Canonize is a superb batch search-andreplace tool for multiple text strings. You define required changes in a bespoke file, which is then applied to other documents. For dealing with style guides (for example, US to UK English), it’s a huge time-saver.

The app remains absurdly powerful. We opened a 150MB text dump in BBEdit on a wheezing Mac mini, which took a short while, but a find-and-replace of 789,097 changes occurred in a blink of an eye.

BBEdit offers a great mix of power and reliability for a whole range of users, for writing, editing, or coding. And it’s a nice touch that you save ten bucks even if the last time you bought BBEdit was in 1992.

The bottom line. After all these years, reliable and powerful BBEdit feels like even more of a bargain.

BBEdit is now a better macOS citizen, notably with its excellent support for Split View.

Canonize performs multiple find-and-replace operations across documents, based on a custom reusable template.