Twenty-three years with the same text editor
I've had a Bare Bones editor on every Mac I've owned since 2003. It was TextWrangler for the first fourteen years — their free one — and when they retired it in 2017 and pointed everyone at BBEdit, I went along and have been there since.
BBEdit's slogan is "It doesn't suck". It's been that for decades, it's very slightly rude, and it's accurate.
What it's for, in my hands
Opening a file and changing something. That's it.
A config file. A log I need to read. A CSV that's misbehaving. A code file where I know exactly which line is wrong. Something enormous that other editors think about for a while before displaying. BBEdit opens all of it immediately, doesn't ask me anything, doesn't index a project, doesn't want to know about my workspace.
I could do these things in VS Code, which is also on this list. But VS Code is a development environment, and starting one up to fix a typo in a config file feels like reversing a lorry into the kitchen to fetch the milk. The weight is the point of VS Code when I'm building something, and the reason I don't want it when I'm not.
The free version is not a demo
Worth being clear, because Bare Bones don't advertise this well: BBEdit has a free mode that doesn't expire. Not a trial. You download it, the evaluation period for the paid features ends, and the app keeps working indefinitely with a smaller feature set.
That smaller feature set is considerably more than I need. Twenty-three years in, I'm not close to the limits of what's free.
The verdict
The paid licence is $59.99 once, with upgrades between major versions at $29.99 to $39.99. Whether to buy it is an easy question for me, because the free version already covers my use — so for me, the paid alternative to BBEdit is the paid version of BBEdit. Download the free one. It will open anything you throw at it, and in a decade you'll still have it.
Part of the Mac software I actually use — nineteen tools, one write-up a week. Put together with AI, based entirely on my own use and opinions.
