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BBEdit

BBEdit

Overview

What is BBEdit?

BBEdit is a text editor from Bare Bones software headquartered in Massachusetts.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

BBEdit, a popular code editor and text editing tool, is highly valued by a diverse range of users including software developers, …
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Pricing

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What is BBEdit?

BBEdit is a text editor from Bare Bones software headquartered in Massachusetts.

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  • No setup fee

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  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Details

What is BBEdit?

BBEdit Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

BBEdit is a text editor from Bare Bones software headquartered in Massachusetts.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.7.

The most common users of BBEdit are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(16)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

BBEdit, a popular code editor and text editing tool, is highly valued by a diverse range of users including software developers, strategists, and architects. Its fast and scriptable text manipulation features make it a go-to choice for developers who need to process raw data files before importing them into a database. Many Mac users rely on BBEdit for its functionality and familiarity, making it their preferred text editor.

Freelance web designers use BBEdit to ensure clean code without hidden formatting, while departments utilize its free option and script functions to semi-automate text processing tasks for publishing work. Sports departments specifically depend on BBEdit for processing text related to rosters, schedules, and other sports information. It is widely recognized that BBEdit outperforms default text editors on both PCs and Macs, making it the ideal choice for various text editing tasks.

Users appreciate BBEdit's comprehensive functionality and regard it as worth the investment. Its capabilities as a note-taker, code editor, and scratch-pad are highly useful with features like auto-save and macro functionality. It is especially reliable for working with CSV files, allowing users to make bulk changes efficiently and search for specific information seamlessly. In summary, BBEdit serves as an indispensable tool for many professionals in different industries thanks to its powerful features and unparalleled performance.

Efficient Multi-File Search and Replace: Several users have praised BBEdit for its powerful multi-file search and replace features, which are comparable to those found in UNIX command-line tools. This indicates that the software is highly capable and efficient when handling complex tasks.

Beneficial Source Control and Compiler Integration: Reviewers have mentioned that BBEdit offers source control and compiler integration, making it a valuable tool for software developers. This feature caters to the specific needs of this user group, enhancing their workflow efficiency.

Convenient Scripting and Macro Features: Users appreciate the scripting and macro capabilities offered by BBEdit, as they help streamline repetitive tasks. By providing automation capabilities, the software allows users to save time and increase productivity.

  1. Limited Markdown Support: Some users have expressed disappointment that BBEdit does not offer the same integration with browsers for HTML preview to markdown files. This feature limitation has been mentioned by multiple reviewers, hindering their ability to efficiently work with markdown files within the software.

  2. High Cost Relative to Functionality: Several reviewers have stated that they find the cost of BBEdit to be too high considering its functionality. They mention that there are free or low-cost alternatives available in the market that provide similar features, making it difficult for them to justify the expense of purchasing BBEdit.

  3. Overwhelming Options and Upgrades: A number of users feel overwhelmed by the numerous options and frequent upgrades offered by BBEdit. They question whether all the functionality provided is necessary for optimizing code and improving efficiency, suggesting that a streamlined version might be more user-friendly for those who prefer simplicity in their coding experience.

Users of BBEdit have provided several recommendations based on their experiences with the product. The three most common recommendations include:

  1. Trying BBEdit: Many users recommend giving BBEdit a try, especially for Mac users who need a powerful tool for manipulating raw text and coding. Users suggest trying the free version of Textwrangler or the BBEdit trial to see if it meets their needs. Some users even mention that BBEdit is the best text editor on the market and has been for more than two decades.

  2. Exploring Features and Tutorials: Users highlight the abundance of features in BBEdit and consider it essential for teams that frequently work with text. They believe that BBEdit can significantly boost the development of business systems due to its functionalities. However, some users suggest going through text selection tutorials before using BBEdit in production to fully take advantage of its capabilities.

  3. Pop-up Issue: While many users appreciate the features of BBEdit, some have expressed frustration with pop-ups that appear while using the application. These users hope that future updates will address this issue, as they find it disruptive to their workflow.

In summary, users recommend trying BBEdit, exploring its features, and taking advantage of tutorials. While many praise its power and simplicity, some would like to see improvements regarding pop-ups.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-7 of 7)
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Kevin O'Grady | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Anywhere you have text, you need BBEdit. It handles complex text just as easily as simple text. It has an excellent search and replace functionality. Superb sorting, and it is excellent fast removal of gremlins. They call it Zap Gremlins on the menu, and it is one I use a lot in my daily work.
January 25, 2020

Great Text Utility

Michael Prewitt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I'm primarily a graphic designer who does occasional web development. For me, BBEdit works very well. I use it both for developer projects (editing code, editing system files) and for general text processing (cleaning up, formatting, or extracting text). I like that it offers real-time previews of edits to web project files. It comes with some nice editor themes and supports adding more or customizing them. I expect that for some coders, it will be inadequate. It is not an IDE. On the other end of the spectrum, someone who expects an experience more like Microsoft Word will be very disappointed; or if they wanted something more along the lines of Windows Notepad, they may find it to be overkill. It is an ASCII text editor with many advanced commands and tools built-in.
Courtney Birnbaum | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
BBEdit's free version is great as an update to the group's previous product Text Wrangler, which, as that name implies, allowed us to manage any text to remove odd formatting and adjust the text to our specific needs as a publishing group. The paid version, which I am less familiar with, has considerably better tools if you are seeking BBEdit for coding purposes, as its HTML ability is much better than the free version I use more regularly. If you are looking for a word processor or other more polished text files, this is unlikely to suit. But if you want a simple program with surprisingly complex uses for preparing text for another program or writing code, this may be the program you need.
Jeff Eaton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
BBEdit was born in the memory-starved days of the early 90s when monitors were black and white and some computers still shipped with a megabyte of RAM. Feature-rich IDEs like Komodo, WebStorm, and even VisualStudio IDE can bring more advanced features like debugger integration and automatic refactoring, but none can rival BBEdit's raw speed. Often, I'll launch BBEdit, open a multi-megabyte codebase, searched for the relevant function calls, and fixed a bug before the "full-featured" alternatives have even finished indexing the same code.

For anyone who works with large data files (tab or comma-separated data, JSON or XML, etc), BBEdit excels at the ugly work of scrubbing and formatting data before it's fed into an automated import or migration process. It puts a clean interface on top of powerful GREP tools, including the ability to save and recall common patterns; it lets me select "columns" of data in raw text files and manipulate them like a spreadsheet; it can call out to shell scripts and command-line utilities to augment its own built-in scripting and automation tools; it has canned tools for managing capitalization, line prefixes and suffixes, stripping and mapping high ASCII characters, removing Unicode "junk" characters, and more. And that's just scratching the surface.
Audrey Burn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I like to use it to view and clean up code, when Dreamweaver isn't as easy to view/edit if you ask me. I probably wouldn't use it with a large site/multiple pages, but I like how easy it is to view the different parts of the code.
Jason Smith, DPA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
BBEdit is suited for a Mac environment where source code or text files need to be edited. BBEdit also has a nice function where you can edit files via SCP so it is good for doing remote editing. I can't really think of a scenario where it is less suited except for doing modern HTML editing. Know that this is not BBEdit's fault, it is just how HTML has become a mess these days.
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