Bare 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.
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.”
That focus on efficiency also translates into real performance gains. SFTP file transfers, for instance, are now between one and two orders of magnitude faster than before. Emoji handling also got some attention in BBEdit 16, with internal changes that make the editor work more smoothly with complex emoji made up of multiple Unicode components, along with updates to the Character Inspector so it can show the Unicode names of characters in a selection.
BBEdit 16 also expands the Shortcuts support from version 15, with a much deeper integration with the system’s App Intents. Now, users can access BBEdit’s text transformations directly from Shortcuts, including operations for sorting text, processing duplicate lines, finding or deleting lines that match a pattern, and running Replace All with grep support.
Some of those actions do not even require BBEdit to be visibly running. Additionally, Siegel tells 9to5Mac that this is an ongoing effort that will expand as users start building workflows around it.
For BBEdit users who’ve been relying on LLM integration within Worksheets, today’s update also brings a more modern chat experience. BBEdit 16 adds support for streaming APIs, so responses now begin appearing as soon as data comes back from the server, rather than only being inserted after the full response is complete.
The update also improves model selection. While previous versions allowed users to choose from a predefined list or manually type in a model name, BBEdit 16 can now request a current list of available models from supported providers via their APIs, allowing users to pick from that list directly instead of manually keeping track of model names.
Finally, BBEdit 16 also brings updates to a few long-running parts of the app. Its built-in HTML syntax checker, for instance, now uses the W3C API for validation. There is also an option to run the checker locally for users who do not want to send HTML out to an external service.
Site tools have also been updated to support separate test and production deployment locations, so users no longer need to shuffle server settings back and forth when moving between staging and public sites. For users coming from VI, BBEdit 16 adds VI keyboard emulation.
BBEdit 16 is available today, with pricing unchanged from previous releases: $60 for new users, $30 for upgrades from BBEdit 15, and $40 for upgrades from older versions. BBEdit 16 is also a free upgrade for BBEdit 15 customers who purchased a license on or after November 1, 2025.
As usual, the app’s Free Mode remains available, and the new release resets the 30-day fully functional trial period.
To check out BBEdit 16’s full release notes, follow this link.
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