BBEdit 16(barebones.com)
127 points by qaz_plm 1 hour ago | 13 comments
kennywinker 31 minutes ago
In 1998 bbedit 5.0 cost $120 usd. Adjusted for inflation that would be about $245 usd.

Today an individual license costs $60.

Wild how software pricing and sales models have changed, and good on bare bones for staying away from subscription pricing.

bellowsgulch 3 minutes ago
I would rather software companies sell at more realistic prices so that they have a sustainable business, and signal to others in the industry that it's still possible to build a sustainable business.

No, we should not praise software companies for hobbyist practices like selling $1 app on the App Store, which say, 30% goes to a digital distribution store, and then of your after distribution fees, about 20%+ percent goes to the federal and local government.

Pay for updates, and charge rightfully like you're supporting an engineer's salary, and that you have a commercial real estate lease to pay, and the compensation packages of full-time employees with benefits.

And boo people who say otherwise. No other professional field do I know of exists where cheap bastards abound while the entire industry is dependent on monopolies to pay the high wages of engineers.

pokstad 4 minutes ago
The software world is different today. People expect you to release security updates as vulnerabilities are discovered. They expect you to fix your application so that it works on the newest macOS that deprecated and broke the old APIs you used (or switch architectures). We expect continuous maintenance for a fixed price. I wish Textmate had a yearly charge to keep their team running instead of the one time purchase that starved them.
factorialboy 26 minutes ago
The pie (market) has also vastly expanded since 1998. Need to factor that, and not just inflation.
sedatk 18 minutes ago
Proportionally, competition has vastly expanded too.
LeoPanthera 40 minutes ago
My search for a "just a text editor" ended with "CotEdit". It's Mac native, not Electron, and supports both RTL and vertical text. All I could ever want.
classichasclass 1 hour ago
Proud user since the classic Mac OS days (anyone else remember the OpenDoc version?), and it's still a solid editor at a good price.
Cassell 41 minutes ago
TextWrangler!
sigzero 41 minutes ago
Same. Recently moved to Windows (blah) but if I move back, that's a purchase for me.
kstrauser 46 minutes ago
I use Zed more now, but BBEdit's still pretty great. I love, love, LOVE that I can extend it with shell scripts or Python tools or Rust apps or whatever else I have laying around. Sometimes I don't want to write a whole plugin, let alone in JavaScript or whatever. I just want to say "process this text with this tool" and have it work. BBEdit's second to none for that.
_HMCB_ 1 hour ago
Love to see this app trending on HN.
headwayoldest 1 hour ago
I have used and loved Barebones stuff in the past, but strikes me as odd they're still advertising Yojimbo on their main page. It was fantastic, but has been abandoned for quite some time.
sharkjacobs 57 minutes ago
It's supported for Tahoe. It's still good functional software and this is the ideal right? They're selling finished software for a flat price without needing a subscription model to support continued development.
kstrauser 53 minutes ago
You were downvoted but right. The changelog[0] shows that the current minor version (4.6) came out in 2020, and its only had 3 bugfix releases since then, most recently in 2023. A lot has changed since 2020, so this doesn't know about the major iCloud updates, or Apple Intelligence, or UI changes (not just talking about Liquid Glass either).

None of those things imply that it's broken or unusable. Still, it means it's going to feel like a dated app and that's not fun.

[0]https://www.barebones.com/support/yojimbo/archived_notes.htm...

debugnik 32 minutes ago
> so this doesn't know about the major iCloud updates, or Apple Intelligence, or UI changes

I'm not familiar with macOS: Why would an application need to be updated for any of these? Were the existing APIs insufficient to integrate these?

Barbing 30 minutes ago
If they add one word, “Legacy“, under the product name, I would likely be adequately warned.

Barebones is great!

KenSF 23 minutes ago
It still doesn't suck.
steviedotboston 1 hour ago
Love BBEdit!
submeta 25 minutes ago
BBEdit used to be my text-transformation tool.

Happily paid for every update for years, even when I used Emacs, I kept BBedit in reach. For quick text edits/transformations (because Regex in Emacs is hard to use). But with LLMs + nvim I hardly start bbedit anymore.

So now with LLMs, I tell them what I need and they write a shell/Perl/Python script to make the craziest transformations.

gnerd00 1 hour ago
So great to see this -- the last version of BBedit I paid for is the gold standard for me, for editors... I mean compared to twenty other editors of various kinds on desktop Linux and elsewhere..
jfb 1 hour ago
I wonder if it will ever get emacs tabs.
marcelox86 51 minutes ago
I use emacs but I don't know what you're referring to. Can you enlighten me please
k33n 39 minutes ago
I think maybe he meant chords.
throwaway613746 1 hour ago
[dead]
ndegruchy 1 hour ago
> Support for vi keyboard emulation, for basic navigation and editing;

I'm sure some people will like this update, but it's a big meh for me. I'll wait for some further updates to upgrade.

dizhn 20 minutes ago
You can search for text within images.