GoKawiilBare Bones’ legendary text and code editor, BBEdit, was updated for macOS today with a massive list of new features, including text search inside images, expanded Shortcuts automation, streaming AI worksheets, and new customization options. Here are the details.
BBEdit 16 is, unsurprisingly, a big one
As longtime BBEdit users know, Bare Bones doesn’t update the version number of its app willy-nilly. When BBEdit 15 arrived in January 2024, it brought a long list of major additions, including built-in ChatGPT worksheets, the Minimap palette for getting a scaled-down overview of an entire document, expandable Cheat Sheets, Text Merge, and a reworked project system.
Today, BBEdit 16 is being released with an even longer list of new features and improvements, chief among them, in-image text search with support for grep patterns.
This means that users can not only search for text inside screenshots, photos, and other image files directly from BBEdit’s existing multi-file search interface, but also use more advanced pattern matching to find variations of a term, specific text structures, or repeated formatting patterns that a simple keyword search might miss.
As Bare Bones founder and CEO Rich Siegel told 9to5Mac, “this is very much in the spirit of BBEdit of finding text wherever it happens to be. And [images are] simply a new place to look.”
BBEdit 16 also improves on the Notebooks feature, offering filtering with built-in indexing for faster searching, a welcome addition to heavy users who rely on BBEdit for large volumes of text and projects. Additionally, Notebooks and projects can use different color schemes, which will help users differentiate between workspaces at a glance.
And speaking of faster searching, BBEdit 16 includes a ton of under-the-hood performance and code improvements that make it run lighter, which in turn demands less processing power and, ultimately, energy.
As Siegel tells 9to5Mac:
“Is this gonna save the world? No, it’s not. It’s a small thing. But I kind of want to lead by example here and get everybody on board with the idea of doing less better.”
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