BBEdit 16 offers speed boosts and Shortcuts and Emoji upgrades

Find text in an image? No problem.

The latest version of Bare Bones Software’s venerable text editor, BBEdit, arrived on Thursday. Version 16, the first full-version update in more than two years, offers an array of new features including dramatic performance improvements, much greater Shortcuts support via App Intents, and even support for vi keybindings.

As you might expect for an app that’s several decades old, BBEdit benefits from occasional checks by its lead developer, Bare Bones founder and CEO Rich Siegel, to see if older areas of the code are performing as well as one might expect. In this cycle, he’s looked for areas to improve performance and found several, most impressingly an improvement of an order of magnitude or greater when it comes to remote file transfers via SFTP.

So many Shortcuts options.

With Apple heading toward an automation universe where many features of apps are broken out into App Intents, BBEdit 16 offers a load of new actions accessible straight from Shortcuts, including access to some of its best text utility functions, like Delete/Extract Lines Containing and Process Duplicate Lines.

Searches in projects will now find text in images, thanks to support for Apple’s VisionKit. There’s a new index in the side of Notebooks. The app now supports separate settings to deploy projects to both test and production environments. Emoji support is seriously improved, which is great news if you’ve ever pasted an emoji into BBEdit and stared into the Zero Width Joiner abyss as your emoji was blown into its component parts.

Other new features include support for the W3C’s online HTML checker, speed improvements for AI worksheets, and with some big changes to syntax coloring. Bare Bones counts more than 100 new feature additions, cataloged by its usual detailed release notes.

Perhaps most importantly, the app—which is probably the single most important one on my Mac—offers a great many of its features for free, and has for years. In my opinion, every Mac user should have a copy of BBEdit handy.

The release of 16.0 also resets the clock on the free trial mode that lets you use all of its features. The paid version of the app is $60, and users of older versions can update for $30 (version 15) or $40 (earlier). It’s also available on the Mac App Store for a $5/month or $50/year subscription.