Bare Bones Software Release Notes

BBEdit 16.0 is a major upgrade, which includes significant new features; visible changes to existing features; and fixes for reported issues.

Because BBEdit 16 builds on features that were added during the BBEdit 15 cycle (as well as previous versions), please take a few moments to browse the release notes archive and review the release notes for any versions that you may not have seen.

To get a high-level overview of what’s new in BBEdit 16, with screen shots, see the What’s New in BBEdit 16 page.

For a comprehensive list of the changes introduced in BBEdit 16.0, please see the BBEdit 16.0 change notes.

For detailed information on using any of BBEdit’s features, please refer to the user manual (choose “User Manual” from BBEdit’s Help menu).

Requirements

BBEdit 16 requires macOS 14.0 or later.

For whichever version of macOS you are using, please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version. This will resolve any functional issues caused by bugs and regressions in out-of-date versions of the OS.

Upgrading

If you have been using any previous version of BBEdit in Free Mode, starting BBEdit 16.0 will reset your 30-day evaluation period, so that you can have a full trial of the new features.

If you have previously purchased a license from us for BBEdit 15 or older, you will have a full 30-day evaluation period in which to try out BBEdit 16’s new features. License upgrades are available at a discount for existing customers, and some customers may be eligible for a free upgrade (based on date of purchase). Please see the BBEdit upgrades page for information and instructions.

Additions & Changes

• The BBEdit 16.0.2 update contains only changes to address reported issues. There are no feature additions or changes in this update.

Fixes

• Fixed crash or other misbehavior which would occur when an SFTP connection failed due to host key mismatch, port number misuse (pro tip: port 21 is for FTP, port 22 is for SFTP, and FTP and SFTP are not related in any way other than sharing three letters), or other exceptional conditions.
• Corrected a behavior regression in which new documents could be created in the active project/instaproject, rather than in a new window or in the first available non-project window (depending on settings).
• Fixed bug in which global disablement of LSP semantic token coloring wasn’t respected.
• Fixed bug in which Prefix/Suffix Lines mishandled partial-line selection ranges.
• Allow Command-delete as a synonym for “Don’t Save” in the “do you want to save changes to this document” close alert.
• Fixed crash that would occur when closing the Find window in the (very short) time interval during which it was waiting to update live match state.
• Fixed crash that would occur when closing a document at the same time a clock change, time zone change, or day change notification was received in the application.
• Fixed crash which could be caused by immediately closing an FTP browser or project window immediately (in a very narrow time window) after opening it.
• Made a change to address a rare reported crash.
• Made a change to address a reported sporadic crash which would occur when loading a file.
• Made changes to resolve a potential race condition that could cause the minimap to crash sporadically.
• Fixed a potential crash which could occur while quitting, when an open window was blocked by a window-modal sheet.
• Fixed an obscure crash which could occur if a document was closed while waiting for the application to finish restoring its soft wrap and selection state (if it had been soft wrapped).
• Fixed crash that would occur while checking links in a file and the project site settings didn’t specify a server URL or directory.
• Function scanning in codeless language modules once again considers text in comments; this had changed (intentionally) for 16.0, but there were unintended consequences for some language module developers.
• Improved reporting of Git merge conflicts in the working copy status.
• Fixed bug in which site deployment would silently do nothing if the local content root wasn’t in a Git repository.
• Fixed an ancient lurking horror involving leading slashes in SFTP server paths.
• Fixed a bug in which certain character sequences in DefaultKeyBindings.dict weren’t interpreted correctly.
• Corrected several behaviors in vi emulation involving Visual mode and word-oriented editing. Visual e now extends the selection through the final character of the word; iw is now recognized for inner-word selections and operator commands such as viw, diw, and ciw; and s now substitutes the current character or selection and enters Insert mode.
• Fixed misplacement of the insertion point after zero-length LSP edits occurring during certain completions.
• Made a change to prevent a race deadlock when checking the modification date of a remote file before saving it.
• Fix a crash which could occur in the Find window when dismissing it via a Return key in the search text box, and an error (such as a malformed Grep pattern) occurred in the process.
• Fixed insertion point misplacement when using G in vi mode in soft wrapped documents.
• Made a change to resolve a Shell Worksheet behavior issue when sending very large command strings to the shell.
• Fixed regression in which the legacy “Keyword Pattern” codeless language module key was not loaded or validated.
• Corrected title of the “Show in Finder” entry in the Menus & Shortcuts settings.
• Fixed regression in which Unix shell script coloring would get confused by things that looked like they might have been regular expressions, but weren’t.
• Corrected behavior of line-oriented commands in vi mode.
• Corrected misbehavior of counted dd, cc, and yy in vi mode, in which the range of lines affected always started at BOF.
• Implemented { and } for paragraph movement in vi mode.
• Corrected the font attributes returned by requests from the accessibility API to include a correct specification of the font, as well as the prevailing foreground color.
• Corrected calculations for text range boundaries requested via the accessibility API when Soft Wrap Text was turned on.
• Return the actual effective font size via the accessibility API, rather than relying on the client to determine magnification.
• Corrected behavior of o/O in vi mode.
• Fixed bug in which blockquote markers were not colored correctly for successive blockquote runs in Markdown documents.
• Corrected handling of unexpected response block types in Anthropic API responses.
• Improved correctness of vi word motion and insertion placement when exiting visual mode.
• Removed the vestigial “Remove” item from the context menu in the custom language settings list.
• Corrected selection/cursor behavior when using t and friends in vi mode.
• Corrected coloring while editing in files backed by some codeless language modules.
• Corrected behavior of a in vi mode when used at end-of-line.
• Corrected behavior of screen-movement keys in vi mode.
• Corrected appearance of the “exchange find and replace field contents” button in the Find and Multi-File Search windows when running on macOS 14.

BBEdit 16.0 is a major upgrade, which includes significant new features; visible changes to existing features; and fixes for reported issues.

Because BBEdit 16 builds on features that were added during the BBEdit 15 cycle (as well as previous versions), please take a few moments to browse the release notes archive and review the release notes for any versions that you may not have seen.

To get a high-level overview of what’s new in BBEdit 16, with screen shots, see the What’s New in BBEdit 16 page.

For a comprehensive list of the changes introduced in BBEdit 16.0, please see the BBEdit 16.0 change notes.

For detailed information on using any of BBEdit’s features, please refer to the user manual (choose “User Manual” from BBEdit’s Help menu).

Requirements

BBEdit 16 requires macOS 14.0 or later.

For whichever version of macOS you are using, please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version. This will resolve any functional issues caused by bugs and regressions in out-of-date versions of the OS.

Upgrading

If you have been using any previous version of BBEdit in Free Mode, starting BBEdit 16.0 will reset your 30-day evaluation period, so that you can have a full trial of the new features.

If you have previously purchased a license from us for BBEdit 15 or older, you will have a full 30-day evaluation period in which to try out BBEdit 16’s new features. License upgrades are available at a discount for existing customers, and some customers may be eligible for a free upgrade (based on date of purchase). Please see the BBEdit upgrades page for information and instructions.

Additions & Changes

• The BBEdit 16.0.1 update contains only changes to address reported issues. There are no feature additions or changes in this update.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug in which externally opening a disk-based project which was already open would select its project settings pane.
• Fixed bug in which password prompts from sudo and ssh in shell worksheets were not being handled by the application as they should have been.
• Allow hours and days in the Unix script progress window, for scripts that take that long to run.
• Fixed bug in which the file panel presented by the “Run Unix Filter” text factory configuration panel was a little too aggressive in filtering things.
• Improved the experience when editing Markdown files which are used as input for various content systems such as Jekyll which use custom attributes to signal Markdown content inside of div and other blocks.
• Fixed regression in which a partial line selection was inappropriately used for determining the range of text to be processed for line-oriented transformations (such as Process Lines Containing). This usually resulted in no work being done.
• Fixed a regression in codeless language module scanning which would cause a hang or crash in some cases.
• Improved recognition of DSL-style Perl function declarations, as used by Dancer2.
• Corrected navigation and selection behavior when using Visual (Line) mode with vi key bindings enabled.
• Fixed reporting when the W3C validator service returns HTTP status 503 (“service unavailable”).
• Made a change to prevent a crash which could occur during system theme switching (light mode to dark).
• Fixed bug in which fold ranges for parameterless math environments in TeX files weren’t correct unless the opening delimiter was followed with a space.
• Updated stale content in the What’s New page in the help book.
• Adjusted links to “Editors at War”.
• Fixed deadlock which would occur when a remote SFTP server unexpectedly closed down the connection unilaterally.
• Fixed a layout glitch in which expanding and collapsing the site settings view in a project window would reshape the window.
• Fixed bug in which projects included in a multi-file search didn’t search any image files referenced by the project.
• Fixed cases in which sidebar search in notebooks would sometimes fail to find notes that matched the search words.
• Made a change to only use the W3C validator (by default) when the document’s DOCTYPE declaration signals HTML5, and not for older HTML document types.
• Corrected the behavior of “G” when used as an operation modifier in vi command mode.
• Corrected repeat-operator behavior in vi emulation.
• Corrected off-by-one stacking placement when creating new windows.
• Fixed keyboard input mapping issue when a DefaultKeyBinding.dict file is in use with equivalents specifying numeric keypad keys.
• Corrected vi visual/operator G selection endpoint calculation.
• Corrected link to the W3C checker help on the web site.
• Fixed bug in which opening a single file from an FTP browser window would sometimes open it again in cases where the corresponding document was already open.
• Made a change so that commands sent in shell worksheets no longer appear in the shell’s own global history.
• If a service error is returned by the W3C validator during a batch check (folder/site), the error is logged into the results rather than being allowed to interrupt the batch operation.
• Fixed bug in which FTP/SFTP client connections weren’t correctly being reused, leading to unnecessary reauthentication (which was generally invisible but would become a nuisance when 2FA was in use).
• Made a change to fix reported symptoms in which the App Store subscription status was not presented correctly at startup.
• Fixed bug in which changing W3C validator settings in the HTML-specific language preferences didn’t affect the behavior as intended.
• Fixed bug in which the application would incorrectly determine the download file size of a remote SFTP file, sometimes leading to unexpected results if the file had been changed on the server in between the local determination of the file size and the actual download.
• Made changes to improve handling of W3C validator rate limits, which show up as HTTP 503 (“service unavailable”) errors during batch checks.
• Fixed performance bug in “Check Site Links”.
• File name case warnings when checking links include the actual name of the file on disk.
• Corrected cosmetic behavior of indeterminate progress bars in application-modal progress dialogs.

Requirements

BBEdit 16.0 is a major upgrade, which includes significant new features; visible changes to existing features; and fixes for reported issues.

Because BBEdit 16 builds on features that were added during the BBEdit 15 cycle (as well as previous versions), please take a few moments to browse the release notes archive and review the release notes for any versions that you may not have seen.

To get a high-level overview of what’s new in BBEdit 16, with screen shots, see the What’s New in BBEdit 16 page.

For detailed information on using any of BBEdit’s features, please refer to the user manual (choose “User Manual” from BBEdit’s Help menu).

BBEdit 16 requires macOS 14.0 or later.

For whichever version of macOS you are using, please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version. This will resolve any functional issues caused by bugs and regressions in out-of-date versions of the OS.

Upgrading

If you have been using any previous version of BBEdit in Free Mode, starting BBEdit 16.0 will reset your 30-day evaluation period, so that you can have a full trial of the new features.

If you have previously purchased a license from us for BBEdit 15 or older, you will have a full 30-day evaluation period in which to try out BBEdit 16’s new features. License upgrades are available at a discount for existing customers, and some customers may be eligible for a free upgrade (based on date of purchase). Please see the BBEdit upgrades page for information and instructions.

Additions

• This release of BBEdit introduces expanded support for macOS “Shortcuts”, via additional actions provided in the Shortcuts application. A “Transform Text” operation allows invocation of “one shot” operations of many kinds, and transforms are provided for extracting matching lines, deleting matching lines, sorting lines, and text replacement.
  Although accessors are provided for getting and setting the contents of the active BBEdit document (or its selection range), the Shortcuts support is intended to make BBEdit’s powerful text transformations available to workflows outside the application – after all, BBEdit already supports (and will continue to support) text factories as well as text filters, any of which can be purpose-built for operating on text in the application.

• Added support for using the W3C HTML checker service. This is on by default, and improves the correctness and accuracy of syntax checking in HTML5 documents. XML documents and non-HTML5 document types (as determined by the DOCTYPE declaration) continue to use the built-in syntax checker.
  Settings to control this are available in the “Syntax Checker” section of a project document’s settings, as well as in the HTML language-specific settings (which you can customize via the “Custom Settings” tab in BBEdit’s “Languages” settings).
  Use of the W3C service involves sending your HTML files securely via HTTPS to the W3C checker service. Bare Bones Software never sees your HTML code, and the W3C service does not retain any data submitted to the syntax checker.
  If you prefer, you can run the checker locally. To do this, you will need to follow some steps:

  1. Download and install the Docker application for macOS: https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop/ If you don’t already have a Docker account, you can set one up and the free tier will suffice.
  2. Using Homebrew or a similar package manager, install the docker command-line tool: brew install docker. Alternatively, you can create a symlink named docker somewhere in $PATH to /Applications/Docker.app/Contents/Resources/bin/docker.
  3. In BBEdit, configure the checker URL (in project settings or globally, as appropriate) to “http://localhost:8888/”.

  Steps 1-3 need only be done once.

  To start the server, run this command:

  docker run -it --rm -p 8888:8888 ghcr.io/validator/validator:latest
  

  This will also install and/or update the checker, as needed.

  To learn more about the W3C syntax checker, visit the page: https://validator.nu/about.html

  If you believe that the W3C syntax checker is inappropriately reporting an error or warning, we recommend that you file a bug report with the checker.

• BBEdit can search for text in images, via OS-provided image text recognition. Use the Find or Multi-File Search windows to search for (and extract, if desired) matches for a given string or Grep pattern within image files.
  Some behavior notes:

  • image search is on by default for multi-file searches, and may be controlled via the “Search for text in image files” option, behind the Options button in the Multi-File Search window. (This option operates independently of file type selection.)
  • image search is disabled when running a Text Factory or when doing a multi-file Replace All operation.
  • to preserve compatibility with existing AppleScripts, image search is done for scripted find verbs only when an explicit search image files parameter requests it.
  • throughput for multi-file search is limited by the performance of the OS image text recognition, but repeated searches of the same image files within the same run of the application will be much faster.

• Notebooks get a text search field at the bottom of the sidebar. You can use this to search for string matches in note names as well as contents.

• Added settings to projects, instaprojects, and notebooks for project- (and notebook-) specific color scheme settings. Settings here will override the global preferences (including, subject to setting, any language-specific overrides).
  For project documents that have been saved to disk, the color scheme settings are in the project settings (visible when clicking on the first item in the sidebar, corresponding to the project itself). For notebooks and instaprojects (created by opening a folder), the settings are available via the small gear in the action bar at the bottom of the sidebar.

• Added controls to allow use of an alternative color scheme when printing, if desired. The default is to use the document’s current color scheme, but if you routinely work in Dark Mode and print things out, selecting an alternative color scheme generally provides a better outcome.
  The printing color scheme can be changed per-document via the print panel, per-project via the project document settings, and globally in the Printing preferences.
  NB: BBEdit will not use the color scheme’s background color when printing, so as to avoid excessive resource consumption. Also, when printing on paper, a color scheme with a light background will generally give more legible results than one with a dark background.

• Split the “Deployment” settings group in web site projects into three new sections:

  1. “Deployment Settings”, which includes the pre-deployment processing options.
  2. “Deployment Location (Testing)”, which are the previous deployment location settings, carried over from existing projects.
  3. “Deployment Location (Production)”, which is an additional deployment location.

  The previous “Deploy Site” and “Re-Deploy Entire Site” commands (on Markup => Update as well as in the “cloud” menu in the project’s action bar) are renamed: “Deploy Site to Testing” and “Re-Deploy Entire Site to Testing”. This pair of commands uses the “Deployment Location (Testing)” settings for upload.

  A new pair of commands on Markup => Update (and the “cloud” menu in the project’s action bar) are named (respectively) “Deploy Site to Production” and “DeployRe-Deploy Entire Site to Production”. These function similarly, but will use the “Deployment Location (Production)” settings.

  There is no functional difference between “Testing” and “Production” deployments, except for the configured locations. In this fashion, you could (for example) use a local folder and/or server on your LAN for Testing, and a remote file system and/or a public-facing server for Production.

• Keyboard emulation for vi is available, via the corresponding setting in BBEdit’s “Keyboard” settings. This enables a basic set of vi navigation and editing commands and modes. :q will close the active document rather than quitting BBEdit.

  When vi emulation is enabled, mode and command status are displayed in the status bar immediately below the text area (and just to the right of the cursor position). If you want that space back, you can hide it via BBEdit’s “Appearance” settings.

• Added a button to the Languages preferences for installing a desired language module. This will handle copying of the language module to the appropriate location; so any obsolete instructions regarding where to copy the module can be ignored. Using this button will offer to relaunch the application after installing the module; untitled/unsaved documents are preserved and existing documents will reopen.

• The file information panel (via “Get Info” or the document status icon in the navigation bar) adds an indicator when the file has been quarantined by macOS. The adjacent “Clear” button will attempt to remove quarantine.

• Expanded syntax coloring support, via the Language Server Protocol “semantic token coloring” feature. When supported by the language server, this allows the server to provide information on specific ranges of the source code that supplements BBEdit’s built-in syntax coloring for the given language.

  In cases where the server provides coloring information for a given range of text, BBEdit will always prefer that information over its own keyword lookups (including ctags data).

  The presentation and availability of this feature varies by the language and server implementation; some servers do not support semantic token coloring at all, and some do not color the full range of possible symbols.

  Due to the requirements of the protocol and variations in individual server behavior, there may be an observable delay before the coloring adjusts when changes are made in the document. This is not under the application’s control.

• Added support for the macOS standard sharing mechanics, via the context menu in text selections, and on the File menu when text is selected.

• Added a command to the View menu: “Gather Untitled Documents”. This will collect all untitled (never saved) documents into the active window, removing them from other windows (and possibly closing those windows in the process).

• Added a command to the View menu and to the contextual menu in the sidebar: “Move to Window…”. This opens a dialog in which you can choose an extant window for the active document (or selected sidebar documents, as appropriate), and upon confirmation moves the document(s) to the designated window and makes it active. A search box is available to filter candidates. Note that moving all of a window’s documents to another window may result in the active window closing.

• An expert preference is available for enabling the logging of any output generated by certain Git operations, such as push and pull. Use the following Terminal command if desired:

  defaults write com.barebones.bbedit EnableGitCommandOutput -bool YES
  

• BBEdit will roll log files every 10MB; the rolled copy is compressed to save space. The size limit can be controlled via expert preference:

  defaults write com.barebones.bbedit MaximumLogFileSize -int N
  

  where N is an integer representing the maximum size, expressed in megabytes. Use a value of zero to disable rollover. Changes to this setting take effect the next time the application starts.

• Added a separate “Hidden Items” file filtering option for disk browsers and projects (via the magnifying glass at the bottom of the sidebar); this separates file type filtering from visibility filtering, so (for example) you can show only dotfiles (and dotfolders) that are text files.

• Separated file type filtering from invisibles filtering in the Open panel, via a new “Type:” menu (behind the Options button) which allows specification of which file types to show. “Show hidden items” will modify this.

• Added “Import” and “Export” buttons to the Patterns list in the Setup window. This can be used to export patterns for sharing with others, or import patterns provided by others. “Export” will export only the selected patterns; if none are selected then it will export all patterns.

• Enhanced the Unicode display section in the Character Inspector palette to show the Unicode code point names for the respective characters.

• The Minimap palette gets a cursor position display, and a popup menu button displaying the name of the function containing the start of the selection range. Clicking on the function display will open a function menu, from which you can choose another location in the displayed file.

• The image inspector shows information about any text that is recognized from the image (using OS facilities provided for the purpose).

• Git revision lists (as used in “Compare Revisions”, “Compare Arbitrary Revisions”, and the file version menu in the navigation bar) get indicators for revisions that have annotations (such as commit tags or special status as branch head revisions). Further details are available via hover tooltips.

• BBEdit can (now) read (and search) and write files compressed by xz, with the same considerations as files compressed by gzip or bzip2; namely, this is really only useful if the compressed file being opened is a text file.

• Added script attachment points for applicationWillChangeWorkspace and applicationDidChangeWorkspace.

• Added a script attachment point for applicationDidChangeGitBranch. Parameters to this attachment script include the path to the working copy root, the previous branch name, and the current branch name.

• Added an expert preference to disable iCloud Drive support, to be used on the advice of tech support in specific cases when a malfunction in the OS internals prevents the application from starting or running normally.

• AI worksheets support streamed responses, which will shorten the time before responses from the service start to appear in the worksheet. If wrapping is turned on (as it is by default), streamed responses will appear in chunks (corresponding to an unwrapped response line) rather than a word or two at a time.

• Added an “Other…” item to the popup menu for model selection in the AI Worksheet preferences, as well as in the worksheet popover. This makes an API request to the service (if supported) requesting a list of the available models, and then provides a searchable list.

• If you have an appropriate file at ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict, BBEdit will load this and map the key bindings to appropriate operations in the application. (This is an old NeXTSTEP thing, supported since the dawn of Mac OS X, and apparently it still works and at least one person still uses it.)

• Added an option to bbdiff(1): --compare-git-ignored-files, also usable as -G. This parallels the “Compare Git ignored files” option for folder comparison in the Find Differences window.

• Added an option to bbdiff(1): --ignore-case, also usable as -i. This parallels the corresponding setting in diff(1), and provides a solution for performing case-insensitive diffs. (The old --case-sensitive option is supported for existing scripts, but because the default behavior of the tool has always been to perform case-sensitive diffs in the absence of the option, specifying it had no effect and there was no way to request a case-insensitive diff.)

• Added syntax coloring support for Pandoc/R-Markdown style citations in Markdown documents. (There is a corresponding color scheme setting.)

• If you really want to use the prevailing system accent color for the text insertion point, this can be done via the UseSystemAccentColorForInsertionPoint expert preference. To turn it on:

  defaults write com.barebones.bbedit UseSystemAccentColorForInsertionPoint -bool true
  

• “Process Duplicate Lines” gets a new option to include duplicate counts in the duplicated-lines output. Each duplicate line will be prefixed by the number of duplicates that were removed.

• The PHP function scanner will generate fold ranges for #region...#endregion blocks, and entries on the function menu for named #region starts.

Changes

• The panels for “Check Folder Syntax”, “Check Folder Links”, and “Update Folder” (via the Markup menu) use the same interface for choosing directories as the source control “choose working copy” panel.

• The “Custom Settings” tab in the Languages preferences lists all installed languages, and provides quick access for adding and removing customizations, without requiring a trip to a menu button. Double-clicking on a row in the list opens the language-specific settings panel to add or edit custom settings; use the “x” button to clear any custom settings. The “+” button can be used instead of double-clicking to add custom settings.

• The codeless language module internals have been extensively reworked to improve performance, and to correct longstanding issues. With these changes, individual patterns (string, comment, keyword, etc) can be tested and developed using the Pattern Playground if desired, and used in a language module with some assurance that they’ll behave consistently (which was by no means guaranteed before).

• Use an abbreviated date format in FTP browsers if the width of the Date column indicates.

• Added annotations to the summary in the Multi-File Search window for cases when options (behind the Options button) are set to non-default values. (Such as: skipping compressed files, searching Git ignored files, searching invisible folders, etc.)

• Include project documents in the results presented by the “Commands” command.

• Cheat sheets can now specify a policy for handling of backslash character escapes in their contents. This is done by adding an Options dictionary, containing a single key: backslashEscapePolicy. The value of backslashEscapePolicy is an integer, with one of three supported values: 0 for default processing (applies if absent) which will process only backslash escapes corresponding to control characters or hex escapes; 1 to process all backslash escape sequences including \ for a literal backslash; or 2 to suppress all backslash escape processing and treat the text literally.
  An example usage to suppress processing:

  "Options": { "backslashEscapePolicy": 2 }
  

  The Options dictionary may be present at the top level of the cheat sheet, or within an individual entry in the Hints array. If both are present, any conflicting settings are resolved in favor of the individual entry.

• Mark the “Forget” button in the Open Recent alert for a missing item as “has destructive action” so that it gets appropriate treatment by the macOS UI mechanics.

• Versions released in the Mac App Store use updated macOS facilities provided for App Store operations, for improved behavior on newer versions of macOS.

• Changed “ctags symbols” in the color scheme preferences to “Indexed symbols”, since ctags may not necessarily be involved in the process if LSP semantic coloring is in effect.

• Added a new core run kind for language modules, to specify that a range is a regular expression. This supersedes the language-specific run kinds used in the JavaScript and Ruby language modules.

• Subversion support has been retired.

• By default, BBEdit will avoid scanning Git ignored folders during multi-file search. Generally this is fine (and significantly improves search performance), but it also ignores exceptions that may be specified in the .gitignore file. To address this when needed, BBEdit provides a setting in the Multi-File Search options panel to search in Git ignored folders. (This is off by default, for consistency with previous versions.)

• By default, BBEdit suppresses the presentation of system-generated icons on application menu items. (See https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/what_to_do_about_those_menu_item_icons_in_macos_26_tahoe.)

• In the Commands window, allow the search string to match parent menu titles for commands on submenus. (Thus, typing “Insert” will return commands on the Insert submenu of the Edit menu.)

• Editing views will now display a red exclamation point for surrogate pairs describing characters in the Unicode private use area. These have been used in malicious code attacks (see https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/03/supply-chain-attack-using-invisible-code-hits-github-and-other-repositories/) and previously were not displayed correctly.

• Transfer progress and other interactions (SFTP password request, host connection verification, &c) are presented in-window for FTP/SFTP browsers and the “Save to FTP/SFTP Server” panel. This improves overall behavior and resolves some lurking issues with progress presentation.

• When creating a new project, BBEdit will put a .gitignore file in it so that ephemeral and user-specific files are ignored when adding the project to the repository.

• If site deployment completes in the background, BBEdit will post a system notification.

Performance Improvements

• Made significant performance improvements to SFTP protocol operations, including file transfers. Most operations will be visibly faster, in some cases an order of magnitude or more can be expected (limited by network throughput to the server).
• Made changes to improve nominal performance of uppercase character mapping for case-insensitive searches.
• Made a change to significantly improve parsing and scanning performance in the built-in language modules, particularly on extremely large files.
• Made a change to significantly improve performance when calculating the longest line length in very large documents (for scrollbar calibration).
• Made changes to significantly improve performance when typing (inserting, deleting) with a columnar selection.
• Made some changes to reduce the performance cost of checking to see whether certain commonly encountered file types are Zip or tar archives.
• Made changes to improve performance when filtering Zip archives and tarballs in the Open panel.
• Made some small changes to improve performance of the tag balancer in pathological cases.
• Made a change to improve performance when choosing items using the Multi-File Search “Other…” button.
• Changes to improve low-level performance in a number of the built-in language modules.
• Made Hex Dump run a tiny bit faster.
• Made a change to reduce the amount of work done building the SDK file cache for Open File by Name.
• Made efficiency improvements in shell worksheet status display, so that open shell worksheets consume no additional CPU when idle.
• Made some micro-optimizations to reduce the overhead involved in preparing text for sub-line differences calculation.
• Additional low-level efficiency improvements to nominally improve performance in some large-scale operations.

Fixes

• Fixed misbehavior in which items dragged from the Finder into the Multi-File Search window’s source list would add those items, rather than replacing the current selection as intended. (Holding the Option key will add the items, if desired.)
• Made a change to resolve unexpected state restoration in situations where the application was quit less than a minute after restarting from an application self-update.
• Made a change so that the OS no longer offers insertion of verification codes in BBEdit editing windows.
• Layout fixes to modal progress dialogs/sheets when running on macOS 26.
• Made a change to reduce cruft accumulated in the outboard document state storage:
  • expiration of saved state entries is strictly date-based; entries older than 30 days will be aged off, unless they have saved marker data (which can’t be easily reconstructed);
  • old entries with marker data are expired if the file for which the state was saved no longer exists.
• Worked around OS misbehavior when removing notes from a notebook located in iCloud Drive.
• Adjust file info panel layout for macOS 26 appearance.
• Made a change so that the application doesn’t try to change any properties of the macOS color panel unless the color panel is actually visible. This works around a bug in macOS 26.
• Corrected button layout in the filter editor sheet.
• Fixed bug in which errors or other unexpected behaviors would result when specifying a host name in the bookmark editor or FTP/SFTP connection panel, and the name ended with a line break or other unexpected whitespace.
• When printing a live preview window, zero the print margins so that the rendering fills the entire page.
• Corrected button layout glitches when running on macOS 26 and later.
• Fixed bug in which some dock menu commands were inappropriately available when in Free Mode.
• Update the document date display in the status bar appropriately if the calendar day changes (such as across midnight, a time zone change, or sleep/wake cycle).
• Corrected descriptions of change case actions in the scripting dictionary.
• When performing a single-file Replace All, any collapsed folds will remain collapsed whenever possible. This will come at a performance cost if your document has an extremely large number of collapsed folds.
• Fixed bug in which “Compare with Previous” for files in a Git working copy didn’t pick the correct revision for comparison, and so would usually report no differences.
• Corrected button layout in the Software Update window.
• Fixed bug in which a transient progress dialog might appear immediately during operations that otherwise wouldn’t have required one (because they finished quickly enough to not require a progress indication).
• Reworked the text-to-speech implementation (Start Speaking) to use newer macOS APIs. Whether this is an improvement remains to be determined.
• The link checker will no longer report an error when the empty fragment (“#”) is used as a link target.
• Fixed a bug in internal Apple Event targeting in which text transforms would report an error when invoked while keyboard focus was in the sidebar, rather than performing the operation as requested.
• Added accessibility identifiers and help strings for the table views in the Preferences window.
• Fixed bug in which the “Remove Line Breaks” text factory operation would crash if the input text didn’t change as a result of the operation.
• Improved emphasis delimiter handling in the Markdown language module to match the CommonMark specification, including flanking rules and depth matching.
• Corrected syntax coloring in C-family languages in cases where a comment (or something else other than whitespace) immediately followed an “L” size-qualified numeric literal.
• Allow $ as an identifier character in C-family languages.
• Updated the built-in model lists and default models for various chat API services.
• Fixed a bug in the Unix Shell Script language module in which regular expressions used in if [[...]] conditionals would usually break function scanning.
• Made a change to allow new untitled documents to land in the active project document’s window, even one that was created for a folder. (The implicit contract is that the document will later be saved in the instaproject’s folder or added to the project document if it is not discarded.)
• Made changes to improve the visibility of the default insertion point cursor.
• Made changes to improve the visibility of the underline cursor.
• Use the monospaced-digit system font in the software update download progress dialog.
• Made a change to address a race condition in which autosaved documents (such as scratchpads) would spuriously report that the document had been changed on disk.
• Added objc_precise_lifetime to the keyword list for Objective-C/C++.
• Fixed bug in which the Emacs state panel grabbed keyboard focus when first opened.
• Fixed bug in which Perl, Python, Ruby, or Unix Shell Script files which didn’t have #! lines would report an error when trying to run them as scripts from the Script menu or from the Apply Text Filter submenu. This solution is general, so if a language module supports in-editor execution of scripts in that language, those scripts may also be started from the Scripts (or filters) menu.
• Reworked the internal implementation shell worksheets to fix an assortment of longstanding misbehaviors. Worksheets should now be more responsive to cancellation in cases where shell intrinsics are running; and syntax errors in sent commands will no longer cause the underlying shell process to exit prematurely.
• Fixed bug in which the application would look in the wrong place for custom-configured host-specific SSH keys.
• Made some micro-optimizations to nominally improve efficiency in some text transforms.
• Made a change to work around WebKit behavior in live preview windows which caused clicks on in-page links to open the link location in the web browser, instead of navigating there in the preview.
• Updated the scripting dictionary to include a using parameter for extract; if using a Grep pattern for extraction, this exposes the ability to specify the extraction pattern.
• Fixed bug in which collapsed sidebar sections in a project previously saved to disk were not restored to their correct collapsed state when opening the project.
• Added logic to the HTML function scanner so that it’s not confused as often by ?> when it occurs inside of strings within code blocks.
• Fixed clipping of the focus ring around the search box in the Open Recent and Commands panels.
• Corrected the Git branch name display in the status bar when the file’s repository uses the reftables format.
• Fixed bug in which Markdown structures inside of footnotes weren’t colored as expected.
• The Space bar is no longer allowed to toggle disabled items in the Multi-File Search sources list.
• Improved behavior when working with text containing grapheme clusters (typically, emoji combining surrogate pairs and a modifier joined by a zero-width joiner character).
• Fixed bug in which pax format metadata would confuse the tar file parser, leading to empty browser windows when opening tar archives (compressed or otherwise) for reading.
• Fixed bug in which certain tar archives with old-format signed-byte checksum headers would fail to load.
• Made some layout corrections in the Expert Preferences settings.
• Corrected layout in the Text Colors preferences.
• Fixed layout glitches in the application-specific print panel settings.
• Fixed bug in fold generation in very large C-family source files.
• The subtitle in progress dialogs is drawn using the monospaced-digit system font, to minimize text shifting when displaying counted progress operations.
• Allow language module completion of custom keywords beyond the base keyword and “predefined symbol” types.
• Don’t report an error during software update when the download is cancelled.
• Fixed crash which would occur with some files, when extracting metadata for display in the the file info panel.
• Fixed Bonjour discovery of SFTP servers running macOS 13.0 and later.
• Fixed bug in the Lasso language module, in which nulls in the Lasso source would cause it to hang. Thanks to Nir Yehoshua at Cipher Security Labs for reporting this issue.
• Fixed bug in the Java language module in which successive unbalanced generic starts (<) in a Java class definition would cause an infinite recursion, resulting in a crash. Thanks to Nir Yehoshua at Cipher Security Labs for reporting this issue.
• Fixed bug in which in-application edits to a .gitignore file didn’t take effect until the application was quit and relaunched.
• Improved syntax coloring and other handling of Ruby heredocs in which the opening delimiter is suffixed by a simple method call.
• Fixed bug in the VHDL and Verilog language modules in which syntax coloring would get out of sync after certain edits.
• Fixed a memory leak of attributed text displayed during LSP interactions (such as completion and hover help).
• Fixed memory leak when handling changes to ctags files on disk.
• Armorplated the site of a crash reported when creating a new Note and certain malformations existed in the notebook on disk.
• Corrected layout in the Apply Text Transform dialog box on macOS Tahoe.
• LSP workspace detection will recognize a buildServer.json file as an indicator for a workspace root.
• Fixed a bug in which site deployment would not deploy anything if the project’s local site root was Git ignored.
• Corrected behavior in site deployment in which an error was reported while trying to remove metadata from image files whose format didn’t support the operation.
• Fixed bug in which the application-modal progress panel might not appear during certain operations (such as site deployment).
• Corrected appearance and layout of the various buttons in the Find and Multi-File Search windows. (For better or worse, macOS 26 will tint these.)
• Fixed bug in which a Sort Lines operation in a text factory didn’t honor the option to randomize ordering, if that was set.
• Fixed an unnecessary beep in the Pattern Playground.
• Fixed a memory leak in the INI file parser.
• Added code to guard against a reported crash.

BBEdit 15.5.5 contains performance improvements and fixes for reported issues.

For details on all the new features and enhancements available in BBEdit 15, please see the release notes for BBEdit 15.0, BBEdit 15.1, and BBEdit 15.5.

Requirements

BBEdit 15.5 requires Mac OS X 12.0 or later.

For whichever version of macOS you are using, please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version.

This is particularly important in the case of macOS Sonoma (14.x), which contains bugs and regressions that affect BBEdit’s operation.

Upgrading

If you have been using any previous version of BBEdit in Free Mode, starting BBEdit 15.5 will reset your 30-day evaluation period, so that you can have a full trial of the new features.

If you have previously purchased a license from us for BBEdit 14 or older, you will have a full 30-day evaluation period in which to try out BBEdit 15’s new features. License upgrades are available at a discount for existing customers, and some customers may be eligible for a free upgrade (based on date of purchase). Please see the BBEdit upgrades page for information and instructions.

Additions and Changes

This update contains only fixes for reported symptoms. Please see the release notes for previous versions for details on what is new and changed in the BBEdit 15.5 cycle.

Fixes

• Worked around a bug in macOS 26 (FB20929799) which would cause intermittent stalls in the application.
• Added an option to bbdiff(1): --ignore-case, also usable as -i. This parallels the corresponding setting in diff(1), and provides a solution for performing case-insensitive diffs. (The old --case-sensitive option is supported for existing scripts, but because the default behavior of the tool has always been to perform case-sensitive diffs in the absence of the option, specifying it had no effect and there was no way to request a case-insensitive diff.)
• Layout fixes to modal progress dialogs/sheets when running on macOS 26.
• Fixed misbehavior and crashes when processing a (very) large quantity of diverse HTML documents.
• Fixed crash which would occur when opening HTML files with extremely large inline attribute values (such as data: chunks for images).
• Added a force-quit for the biome language server, which appears to ignore the exit protocol command.
• Made some improvements and corrections to the internal behavior of “Collect Diagnostic Data”.
• The link checker will no longer report an error when the empty fragment (“#”) is used as a link target.
• Fixed a pair of bugs in which file filter settings in project documents were not applied when reopening the project, and changes to the filter settings didn’t take effect immediately.
• Fixed a flow-control issue with high volume script output when running on macOS Tahoe, which would cause some output to be lost.

fin

BBEdit 15.5.4 contains performance improvements and fixes for reported issues.

For details on all the new features and enhancements available in BBEdit 15, please see the release notes for BBEdit 15.0, BBEdit 15.1, and BBEdit 15.5.

Requirements

BBEdit 15.5 requires Mac OS X 12.0 or later.

For whichever version of macOS you are using, please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version.

This is particularly important in the case of macOS Sonoma (14.x), which contains bugs and regressions that affect BBEdit’s operation.

Upgrading

If you have been using any previous version of BBEdit in Free Mode, starting BBEdit 15.5 will reset your 30-day evaluation period, so that you can have a full trial of the new features.

If you have previously purchased a license from us for BBEdit 14 or older, you will have a full 30-day evaluation period in which to try out BBEdit 15’s new features. License upgrades are available at a discount for existing customers, and some customers may be eligible for a free upgrade (based on date of purchase). Please see the BBEdit upgrades page for information and instructions.

Additions and Changes

This update contains only performance improvements and fixes for reported symptoms. Please see the release notes for previous versions for details on what is new and changed in the BBEdit 15.5 cycle.

Fixes

• Fixed bug in which closing the Scratchpad or Unix Worksheet window while it was not the active window would sometimes fail to do so.
• Corrected initial layout and column sizes in the “Find Symbol in Workspace” panel.
• Fixed bug in which unbalanced braces/brackets/etc in Perl string-like constructs (e.g. qr/…/) would interfere with Balance command operation.
• Corrected behavior of Pretty Print when formatting

BBEdit 15.5.3 contains fixes for reported issues.

For details on all the new features and enhancements available in BBEdit 15, please see the release notes for BBEdit 15.0, BBEdit 15.1, and BBEdit 15.5.

Requirements

BBEdit 15.5 requires Mac OS X 12.0 or later.

For whichever version of macOS you are using, please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version.

This is particularly important in the case of macOS Sonoma (14.x), which contains bugs and regressions that affect BBEdit’s operation.

Upgrading

If you have been using any previous version of BBEdit in Free Mode, starting BBEdit 15.5 will reset your 30-day evaluation period, so that you can have a full trial of the new features.

If you have previously purchased a license from us for BBEdit 14 or older, you will have a full 30-day evaluation period in which to try out BBEdit 15’s new features. License upgrades are available at a discount for existing customers, and some customers may be eligible for a free upgrade (based on date of purchase). Please see the BBEdit upgrades page for information and instructions.

Additions and Changes

This update contains only fixes for reported symptoms. Please see the release notes for previous versions for details on what is new and changed in the BBEdit 15.5 cycle.

Fixes

• Allow additional slashes in the line comment delimiter when processing comment callouts in C-family languages.
• Corrected cosmetics of the pattern field editors used in “Process Lines Containing” and other modal panels.
• The “.” between the file name and its extension is not part of the file name extension; so the application will ignore any leading periods when checking a file name against the list specified in the “Text Files” preferences.
• Fixed misbehavior when switching workspaces with one or more Notebook windows open.
• Correct selection range when selecting a line-comment callout from the function menu.
• Color r in Perl scripts when appearing as a pattern modifier.
• Made a change to reduce output latency in Unix script execution progress windows. (There is no assurance that output is isochronous.)
• Fixed a bug in which pattern playgrounds didn’t correctly write out the pattern in use when saved, nor did they preserve the search history.
• Made a change to improve the appearance of the application’s dock icon when running on a future version of macOS.
• Fixed bug in which the “Find Symbol in Workspace” panel did not correctly remember its position and size.
• BBEdit no longer sends a zero temperature parameter to worksheet chat API services; more recent models from OpenAI will report an error in that case.
• If your API service requires an explicit temperature API parameter, set explicitTemperatureParameterRequired: true on the API’s model description, and defaultTemperature to an appropriate value.
• Added gpt-5 to the list of built-in models for ChatGPT worksheets. (As always you can use any model not built in by simply entering its name in the appropriate location.)
• Fixed crash in the FTP client triggered in certain workflows.
• Fixed bug in which accelerated pattern matching in codeless language modules would sometimes fail, leading to incomplete (or nonfunctional) syntax coloring.
• Fixed bug in which certain matching errors while computing syntax coloring in a codeless language module would leave the internals in an inconsistent state, causing problems later.
• Updated the list of keywords in the Tcl language module.
• Fixed bug in which creating a new color scheme (via the “New” button in the Text Colors preferences) didn’t correctly configure it as the active scheme, and so changes would be made to the previously selected color scheme.
• If a file has HFS metadata, but both the type and creator are 0xFFFFFFFF, BBEdit will ignore the metadata rather than assume the file isn’t text. This allows other tests to run (and succeed, if the file qualifies).
• Removed obsolete references from the Clippings cheat sheet.
• When running on macOS 12, any windows that were minimized when quitting will be visible at next launch. This works around an OS bug in which windows unminimized during startup ended up being hidden.
• Fixed crash in the C-family function scanner when processing certain pathological cases.
• Made a change to guard against a potential crash very early in application startup.
• Corrected runtime logging behavior when loading a language module with errors in its property list.

fin

BBEdit 15.5.2 contains fixes for reported issues.

For details on all the new features and enhancements available in BBEdit 15, please see the release notes for BBEdit 15.0, BBEdit 15.1, and BBEdit 15.5.

Requirements

BBEdit 15.5 requires Mac OS X 12.0 or later.

For whichever version of macOS you are using, please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version.

This is particularly important in the case of macOS Sonoma (14.x), which contains bugs and regressions that affect BBEdit’s operation.

Upgrading

If you have been using any previous version of BBEdit in Free Mode, starting BBEdit 15.5 will reset your 30-day evaluation period, so that you can have a full trial of the new features.

If you have previously purchased a license from us for BBEdit 14 or older, you will have a full 30-day evaluation period in which to try out BBEdit 15’s new features. License upgrades are available at a discount for existing customers, and some customers may be eligible for a free upgrade (based on date of purchase). Please see the BBEdit upgrades page for information and instructions.

Additions

• Added a built-in AI worksheet API description for Google Gemini.

Changes

• Due to a security change, the macOS security system may prompt to allow access to the local network when starting BBEdit 15.5.2 and later for the first time. This is normal and appropriate; the application uses local network discovery.

Fixes

• Fixed bug in which “Match using pattern” for Process Duplicates did not work as intended when used in a Text Factory or “Apply Text Transform” operation.
• Fixed crash which would occur when switching appearances (either manually or in response to a system appearance change).
• For configurations which require a save confirmation alert when quitting, Command-D can once again be used as an equivalent for “Don’t Save”.
• Fixed bug in which file names that BBEdit would have recognized as text files, but that the OS didn’t recognize as anything, would have their extensions removed before presentation in the “Open File by Name” window.
• Fixed crash which would occur when receiving error responses from Google Gemini (whose API is perhaps not completely OpenAI-compatible).
• Fixed bug in which certain .editorconfig file malformations would hang the parser (and the application).
• Fixed bug in which FTP/SFTP logging didn’t actually occur when the corresponding expert preferences were turned on.
• Avoid preprocessing filename extensions for Open Selection when the selection looks like a plausible URL.
• Added some additional content types to the list of system-exported types that BBEdit recognizes as text files.
• Worked around a behavior change in ssh on a future version of macOS, which prevented connections from being established when using the built-in SFTP support.
• Improve compatibility with future macOS versions by using a system-provided image for the “swap” button in the Find, Multi-File Search, and Find Differences windows.
• Fixed a regression in which output from Unix scripts and executables which produced a large quantity of output very quickly would be truncated.
• Made a change to the update self-installer to explicitly register the updated application with the OS and ensure launching of the correct version.
• Ensure that additional LSP protocol logging ends up in the log file when “Request verbose logging” is turned on in release versions.
• Fixed misbehavior when using the “Quit” command from the Dock menu, after having previously turned off the preferences which allow BBEdit to automatically snapshot changes when quitting and while the “quitting with unsaved changes” panel is open.
• Highlight matching delimiters while dragging, instead of (potentially) leaving the old highlight in place.
• Fixed a bug in which certain uses of character classes in a Grep pattern would fail to match during a multi-file search.
• Fixed bug in which a non-combining character entered through the system’s text input system which resulted in the dismissal of a combining character (e.g. typing “´” twice) would not mark the document as having unsaved changes in situations where it was the first character typed after saving (or opening) the document.
• Fixed crash when trying to record responses from the Anthropic API which did not contain a text parameter in the response message. (These are now logged and discarded.)

fin

BBEdit 15.5.1 contains fixes for reported issues.
For details on all the new features and enhancements available in BBEdit 15, please see the release notes for BBEdit 15.0, BBEdit 15.1, and BBEdit 15.5.

Requirements

BBEdit 15.5 requires Mac OS X 12.0 or later.
For whichever version of macOS you are using, please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version.
This is particularly important in the case of macOS Sonoma (14.x), which contains bugs and regressions that affect BBEdit’s operation.

Upgrading

If you have been using any previous version of BBEdit in Free Mode, starting BBEdit 15.5 will reset your 30-day evaluation period, so that you can have a full trial of the new features.
If you have previously purchased a license from us for BBEdit 14 or older, you will have a full 30-day evaluation period in which to try out BBEdit 15’s new features. License upgrades are available at a discount for existing customers, and some customers may be eligible for a free upgrade (based on date of purchase). Please see the BBEdit upgrades page for information and instructions.

Additions and Changes

This update contains only fixes for reported symptoms. Please see the BBEdit 15.5 release notes for details on what is new and changed in the BBEdit 15.5 cycle.

Fixes

• Fixed misbehavior (and occasionally a subsequent crash) which would occur when using the sidebar Arrange commands when collections were present and had been twisted open.
• Improve the granularity of sub-line differences when comparing HTML/XML files.
• Fixed bug in which text factories with an extremely large number of operations (close to a hundred) would fail to start, due to resource exhaustion in the OS.
• When loading a chat API description, allow arrays and dictionaries in the additionalRequestParameters dictionary.
• Fixed bug in which the default highlight color for instances of selected text was not correct for dark color color schemes.
• Fixed bug in which the evaluation period was not reset when it should have been.
• Made a change to prevent slowness in Anaconda startup from delaying application startup.
• Fixed bug in which scripts did not honor previously requested output options (output file targeting, clearing, etc).
• Desaturate the frame around highlighted delimiters in order to reduce clutter.
• Increase the default timeout for AI chat worksheet requests to 180 seconds (from the default OS network timeout of 60s).
• Reworked the in-app subscription purchase flow to work around a bug in macOS 15.2 and later (FB17789872) which caused the process to stall at the “Completing your purchase…” stage.
• Fixed bug in which comments following variable blocks in Unix Shell Script files weren’t colored correctly.
• Fixed a latent bug in which “Balance Tags” would read past the end of the text in some cases.
• Added .ips (macOS analytics report) as a default file name extension mapping for JSON.
• Fixed bug in which the Clipboard window display didn’t update when the application was activated after having copied text in another application.
• Corrected the default for the “matched delimiter” highlight color so that it appears correctly in the Text Colors preferences.
• Always post user notifications (for Replace All and other operations), and trust the OS to mediate based on its own authorization settings. If user notifications are found to be disabled when the application starts up, it will be so noted in the log.
• Fixed typo in the Grep help, in which (™) was shown as (?).
• Fixed crash which would occur when displaying completions from language servers which violate the published specification and provide something other than a string for the details field of a returned completion item. (glares at Solargraph)

fin

BBEdit 15.5 contains feature additions, refinements to existing features, and fixes for reported issues.

For details on all the new features and enhancements available in BBEdit 15, please see the release notes for BBEdit 15.0.

Because BBEdit 15 builds on features that were added during the BBEdit 14 cycle (as well as previous versions), please take a few moments to browse the release notes archive and review the release notes for any versions that you may not have seen.

To get a high-level overview of what’s new in BBEdit 15, with screen shots, see the What’s New in BBEdit 15 page.

For detailed information on using any of BBEdit’s features, please refer to the user manual (choose “User Manual” from BBEdit’s Help menu).

Important: Please make sure that you have read the BBEdit 15.0 change notes, and BBEdit 15.1 change notes, as there are significant changes from previous versions.

Requirements

BBEdit 15.5 requires Mac OS X 12.0 or later.

For whichever version of macOS you are using, please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version.

This is particularly important in the case of macOS Sonoma (14.x), which contains bugs and regressions that affect BBEdit’s operation.

Upgrading

If you have been using any previous version of BBEdit in Free Mode, starting BBEdit 15.5 will reset your 30-day evaluation period, so that you can have a full trial of the new features.

If you have previously purchased a license from us for BBEdit 14 or older, you will have a full 30-day evaluation period in which to try out BBEdit 15’s new features. License upgrades are available at a discount for existing customers, and some customers may be eligible for a free upgrade (based on date of purchase). Please see the BBEdit upgrades page for information and instructions.

Additions

• Introducing “workspaces”, a way to switch between arrangements of open documents and windows. A workspace includes the same application state that is saved and restored across quit and relaunch, but can be activated at any time while the application is running. This is useful for (for example) switching between working setups for different clients, or for different types of projects (writing vs programming vs web development).

  The applicable menu commands reside on the BBEdit application menu. To create a new workspace, choose “Save Workspace” and give the workspace a name. To activate a previously saved workspace, choose it from the “Workspaces” submenu. You can overwrite an existing workspace by specifying the same name.

  When switching to a different workspace, BBEdit will ask you to save any unsaved documents which correspond to existing files on disk (or remote FTP/SFTP items). You must save these before switching workspaces. Untitled (never-saved) documents are not affected by workspace changes, and will remain open (and unsaved) when you switch workspaces.

  Saved workspaces reside in the “Workspaces” application support folder, accessible via the Folders submenu on the application menu. If you wish to remove an inactive workspace, deleting the corresponding file will accomplish this. Existing workspaces can be renamed by renaming the corresponding file (whose extension must be preserved when doing so).

  If there are any saved workspaces, BBEdit’s Dock menu will have a Workspaces submenu, so that you can easily switch via the Dock if desired.

  BBEdit does not update a workspace as you open or close documents or move windows around. If you make significant changes and would like to update the workspace, use “Save Workspace” and overwrite the current workspace. (For convenience BBEdit will fill in the name of the current workspace when you use “Save Workspace”.)

  Additionally, BBEdit will prompt you to update a workspace when switching, if necessary. You can control this behavior in the Application settings, using the “When changing workspaces” group of settings.

• Added support for FTPS (FTP protocol run over TLS). The connection panel for “Open from FTP/SFTP Server” and friends provides a popup menu for choosing the security model, as follows:

  • FTP: FTP protocol, no transport security
  • SFTP: SSH file transfer protocol, SSH transport security
  • FTPS (Explicit): FTP protocol, TLS transport security (negotiation requires server AUTH TLS support and negotiation)
  • FTPS (Implicit): FTP protocol, TLS transport security (connection opened immediately; requires server support)

• Added support for the “Writing Tools” feature introduced in macOS 15.2 as part of the Apple Intelligence suite. Thus, the corresponding commands on the Writing Tools submenu of the Edit menu are operational.

• The Git branch item in the navigation bar grows a menu; when clicked this will present the eight most recently committed local branches in alphabetical order, for easy checkout. The “Check Out Branch” command at the end of the menu performs the same function as the corresponding command in the menu bar.

• The popover for LSP diagnostics gets a “Copy” button (“Copy All” if there’s more than one listed), and you can also use “Select All” or select multiple diagnostics and use the Copy command.

• Grep pattern entry fields in various transformation and setup dialogs are syntax colored.

• When running on macOS 15, the Window menu includes “Fill” and “Center” commands, as well as the “Move & Resize” submenu and associated commands.

• The “Zoom” command makes a triumphant return to the Window menu.

• Added “Cascade on Left” and “Cascade on Right” commands to the Arrange submenu on the Window menu. These commands will (respectively) cascade windows on the left and right side of the display, without allowing them to cross the middle. (This is generally more useful on large wide-aspect displays.)

• Various sheets which provide access to saved Grep patterns have added the ability to save and manage patterns from within the window.

• Made changes to improve the experience when running #! or Unix language scripts that take a nontrivial amount of time to complete.

  Using “Run” on a script window, or choosing a Unix script or executable from BBEdit’s Scripts menu will open a window with an icon you can click to get back to the document being run, a progress bar, an elapsed-time indicator, and a cancel button. These all work as you might expect.

  Any output produced by the script will appear in the text area, and when the script execution has finished it will also be added to the appropriate log file. You can get to the log file using the button provided for the purpose.

  Additionally, the output can be selected and copied, and “Save a Copy” on the File menu is available to save the output to a separate file, if desired.

  If the script takes less than two seconds to run and does not generate any output, the progress window will not appear (there’s no need for it).

• When the insertion point is inside of an opening delimiter, or immediately outside a closing delimiter, BBEdit will highlight the matching delimiter, as appropriate.

  If the insertion point is immediately inside of a container element in an HTML document, delimiter matching will highlight the corresponding pair of opening and closing elements. (As part of the HTML tools, this feature is only available during evaluation or with a paid license.)

  The default color is the same one for highlighting live search matches; this may be adjusted in the respective color scheme via the “Text Colors” preferences.

  This feature may be controlled via the “Highlight matched delimiters” option in BBEdit’s “Editing” preferences.

• The keyboard equivalents configurable for opening the search history, saved Grep patterns, and cheat sheet in the Find and Multi-File Search windows can also be used (as applicable) in other locations that use the same menus.

• When right-clicking on two selected files in the sidebar, in addition to “Compare”, “Find Differences” is provided. Choosing the latter will open the Find Differences window prepopulated with the selected files. This provides an opportunity to adjust settings or (if desired) swap the files before doing the comparison.

• Added the ability to preview CSV and TSV files (explicit indicated language of “Comma-separated Values” and “Tab-separated Values”, respectively) using “Preview in BBEdit” or a designated web browser. “Export as HTML” works as well. Note that BBEdit is still not a spreadsheet.

• When copying code responses in an AI worksheet, if the worksheet’s language is Markdown and the selected text of range is in between two fenced code block delimiters with a language specified, BBEdit will attempt to determine the language based on the specified mode, and use that as the language when pasting into a new document.

• Added a contextual menu to the list in the Expert preferences, to simplify copying and resetting individual settings. (Copy was previously available via the Edit menu, and still is.)

• Remote Git push/pull/fetch will display a “Completed” annunciator after successful completion of the operation, so that you at least know that something happened.

• An expert preference is available so that BBEdit uses the active user locale rather than the core system locale when comparing text for Sort Lines. By default this is off; but if for some reason you require localized sort order based on the active language in the system, this is available by employing the following Terminal command:

defaults write com.barebones.bbedit SortLines_UseCurrentUserLocale -bool YES

• Individual notifications can be disabled via expert preferences; these are listed in the “Expert Preferences” listing; type “Notification” in the search box to see them.

• New text transformation: “Strip Diacriticals”. This transform replaces composed diacritical forms in the text with the base character. Thus, “á” becomes “a”, “ç” becomes “c”, and so forth. The transform is available via the Text menu, “Apply Text Transform”, text factories, and the scripting interface.

• Color schemes get a setting for controlling the color used to highlight occurrences of the selected text (or of the word surrounding the insertion point). To adjust this, use the corresponding color setting in the “Text Colors” preferences. Absent an explicit setting, BBEdit will derive this color from the foreground text color.

• Color schemes get a setting for controlling the color used for live search matches (via the Find window or Live Search bar); one setting for the selected match, and one setting for all others. To adjust this, use the corresponding color setting in the “Text Colors” preferences. Absent an explicit setting, BBEdit will use the previous defaults.

• If completions provided by an LSP server include a “details” field, this is displayed next to the completion’s display text in the completion panel.

• Added --ignore-blank-lines as an option for bbdiff(1). As with the corresponding options in the Find Differences window, this will cause lines consisting solely of whitespace to be considered empty for purposes of comparison.

Changes

• In Markdown documents, headings are now indented according to their level. H1 (“# this is an H1”) is not indented, H2 is indented by one space, etc.

  The foldable section associated with a heading now encompasses lower level headings and their sections. So, an H1’s foldable section will include an H2’s section that immediately follows it. These headings will be listed in the function popup with indentation to match this nesting, like an outline.

  Additionally, blockquote sections (indicated with a ‘>’) and list items “belong” to the heading section immediately before them, and act like nested documents. The result is that any headings within those subsections are indented below the parent section. Here’s a small example:

### This is an H3

> This is a blockquote
>
> # This is an H1 in a blockquote
>
> This section will be nested in the function popup
> below/within the H3 at top of the example.

• If desired, you can force BBEdit to read files as UTF-8, even if they are not valid UTF-8. To do this, add “Unicode (UTF-8)” as the only encoding in the list of encodings to try if a file’s encoding can’t be guessed (in the “Text Encodings” preferences).

  This should be used with caution and under advisement; BBEdit can already automatically detect and read valid UTF-8 files, and malformed UTF-8 files may behave unpredictably when edited, searched, and/or saved.

• If the OpenPDFsAsText expert preference is off, as it is by default, BBEdit will display PDFs in-application alongside other documents. This is provided as a convenience; BBEdit is not a replacement for Preview or any other PDF tool.

• Updated imagery in the LSP diagnostics popover so that errors, warnings and notes can be distinguished by shape as well as by color.

• Updated the iconography in the navigation and text status bars to use images provided by the OS, for a more up-to-date appearance and improved behavior when using the “Large” and “Extra Large” status bar item sizes.

• BBEdit uses the standard macOS Window menu, which improves compatibility with ongoing system-wide UI changes in that menu. System-provided commands on that menu can be customized using the System Settings application (and apply to all applications).

• Per-language preferences no longer include the ability to hide the Language status bar item, since doing so makes it impossible to change the document’s language.

• The “Selection only” check box is enabled in the Find window when the target document has a rectangular or other non-contiguous selection. The “Find All”, “Extract”, and “Replace All” buttons will behave accordingly and operate only in the selected ranges of text. NB: if a replacement involves adding line breaks, the outcome may not be what you expect.

• Changes in the Git revision pickers:

  • Rearranged the columns in the Git revision picker; the commit hash is always listed first.
  • Display the commit hash in a monospaced font.
  • Disable sorting based on the commit hash (which is arbitrary and not useful for sorting).

• When using “Compare Revisions” or the navigation bar revision menu for a Git file, BBEdit will disable the HEAD revision from the list of available revisions if the file does not have any pending changes. This improves the overall experience by making sure that the most recent comparable revision is always the first one available, rather than the second.

• When starting the application with the Shift key down, an alert will now appear confirming whether you want to skip the reopening of previously opened documents. (Heretofore the application would do so without prompting and post an OS notification, which quite often could be missed or suppressed.)

• Reworked the internals of multi-file search/replace and Text Factory execution to improve performance and eliminate legacy API use. (The brevity of this description in no way reflects the amount of effort this required.)

• When quitting the application, and either “Restore unsaved changes” or “Reopen documents that were open at last quit” have been turned off, BBEdit will check for documents with unsaved changes before beginning the quit process. If there are any, you can opt to review the documents (which cancels the quit process), or discard all of the unsaved changes (after which the application will quit.)

• Corrected the appearance of the popup menu buttons in the CSS dialog boxes (also used in a few other places) when running in Dark Mode.

• If an instaproject is open on the user’s home directory, BBEdit will avoid opening arbitrary files into its window, since otherwise everything would open there. Rather, only files located immediately in the home directory will open into the instaproject window, as well as files located in invisible directories whose immediate parent is the home directory. (This probably doesn’t make sense to anyone except the one person who needs this behavior, hi Steve.)

• When performing a Grep replacement or Extract operation, the application will warn you if the replace pattern contains references to nonexistent capture groups (subpatterns) in the search pattern.

• If there is a saved default window position (created via “Save Default Text Window” on the Window menu), BBEdit will use this when arranging windows using the “Stack” command.

• Made changes to improve the execution performance of complicated Grep pattern searches, as well as to enable performance improvements for the patterns used in codeless language modules.

• BBEdit will ignore lines beginning with # when processing delimited text files (CSV or TSV) for column analysis as well as previewing. This can be configured via a custom language setting for the respective language, if needed.

• Made a change to improve legibility in the sidebar when it does not have keyboard focus and the system-wide accessibility “Increase contrast” setting is turned on.

• Added support to bbedit(1) for -F, -N, and -S as synonyms for --front-window, --new-window, and --separate-windows, respectively.

• Made changes to improve performance of large-scale operations which involve line analysis and computation (Add/Remove Line Numbers, Prefix/Suffix Lines, Process Duplicate Lines, Sort Lines, Strip Trailing Whitespace).

• Made changes to improve performance in Normalize Spaces, Remove Blank Lines, and Strip Trailing Whitespace on very large files.

• Made a change to improve text scanning performance in the HTML/XML syntax coloring mechanics. (This is most likely noticeable only on extremely large files.)

• When prompting for factory defaults reset in the Text Colors preferences, the list of settings affected is too long and not useful, so it is omitted.

• Add “(no text filters)” placeholders to the “Paste Using Filter” and “Apply Text Filter” submenus, when they would otherwise be empty.

• When using “Export as HTML”, BBEdit will examine the generated output, and if it lacks a basic HTML document structure, the application will apply a simple structure. This is useful for HTML renderers which don’t do this on their own (e.g. most Markdown renderers).

• “Collect Diagnostic Data” allows cancellation of the panel before data collection is finished, which is helpful when the system profiler request hangs.

• Beep instead of alerting when certain invalid character insertions are attempted (using the character panel or other input-simulating systems).

Fixes

• Made a bunch of optimizations to improve performance in the HTML function scanner in pathological cases.

• Made a change to significantly improve layout performance in the Minimap.

• Made some minor cosmetic adjustments to the rendering in the Minimap window.

• Fix for folds on YAML scalars at the end of the document
  Like this:
  a:
  b: |
  value of b
  can be multiple lines
  The fold starts after the pipe and will now include the s at the end of the last word.

• Updated the entitlements in the App Store build to include /opt/homebrew/Cellar/ and /opt/homebrew/opt/, so that Homebrew binaries are usable without requiring explicit sandbox access.

• Fixed typo in an expert preference defaults entry.

• Made a change so that the lifetime of temporary files generated for certain #! menu operations (such as “Run” or “Run in Terminal”) is now tied to the lifetime of the document; BBEdit will delete temporary files when the document is closed, rather than when the application is quit.

• Made a nominal performance improvement to reduce time spent in some cases when opening and closing documents when there are a large number of documents on disk open.

• Fixed bug in which closing a live preview window would fail to save any customizations to preview filter/template/CSS selections.

• Made a change so that the “Get Info” panel will decline to count words in very large documents (same threshold as the Text Statistics status bar item). This improves performance and usability.

• Made a change to significantly improve the performance of soft text wrapping calculations in the text engine.

• Made a change so that the OpenPDFsAsText expert preference takes effect without requiring an application relaunch; turning this setting off will override the PDF language module’s built-in mapping. (Changing the setting does not affect the display of any open PDFs; any such will need to be closed and reopened.)

• Corrected display of some header entries in the Open Recent submenu.

• Fixed bug in which the -Z (--null) output option in bbfind(1) did not work as intended.

• Fixed hang which would occur in the Rust language module when a where clause in a function header was at EOF.

• Made a change to improve performance and correctness when updating modification dates for FTP/SFTP files, when the file’s directory is displayed in the browser, and there are many (thousands) of items in that directory.

• Fixed crash which would occur when attempting some SFTP operations in the wake of a broken connection.

• Corrected the appearance of menu section headers when running on macOS 14.0 and later.

• Made changes to improve performance of high-frequency operations involving EditorConfig.

• Removed duplicate entries from the output of bbedit -h.

• Fixed bug in which notebooks were not added to the list in the Multi-File Search window if they were opened while the MFS window was open.

• Added some declarations to the application’s property list, to let the OS know that BBEdit can open image files, and a “catchall” declaration for other file types.

• When reopening minimized windows during state restoration, the animation into the Dock no longer occurs. (Each minimized window will still briefly appear on screen.)

• Fixed bug in which bash numeric base specifiers would confuse syntax coloring and function scanning.

• Made a change to significantly improve the performance of “Convert to ASCII” when processing fullwidth character forms.

• Fixed bug in which creating a new file in an instaproject folder didn’t select the newly created file in the Project list in cases where the selected or right-clicked item was another file.

• Fixed a potential cause of a reported crash in Open File by Name.

• Fixed bug in which “Close All in Project” did not close any non-text documents (such as images or text factories).

• Made a change to “Cascade Left” so that the windows start at the right-hand side of the display, rather than somewhere in the middle.

• Made a change so that an asterisk at the beginning of a line (with or without intervening whitespace) is not paired while entering text in Markdown documents.

• Corrected display of qualifiers in the custom language preferences when a status bar setting was changed.

• Fixed bug in which CSS syntax coloring didn’t recognize negative floating-point numbers without a leading zero (e.g. -.10).

• Correct coloring of identifiers in CSS at-rule specifiers.

• Various CSS keyword additions and updates.

• Fixed crash which would occur when closing the Multi-File Search window after a previous attempt at closing it via the scripting interface failed because the window was displaying a sheet.

• Fixed bug in which the list of items to process in a Text Factory window did not correctly mark items at the top level (such as windows) in cases where a subordinate item (a document in that window) was automatically marked when the document in question was open.

• Fixed bug in which project windows would open at an infinite width in cases where the editor view had been hidden when the project was closed.

• Fixed crash which would occur while saving FTP/SFTP bookmarks after creating or editing a bookmark, when (any) one of the saved bookmarks was malformed.

• When the string entered into “Open File by Name” contains slashes (for separating path elements), BBEdit will wildcard the intermediate path elements, so that it’s no longer necessary to precisely specify each directory along the path to the file. (This does not guarantee a match, but improves flexibility.)

• Fixed missing text for the “Remove Blank Lines” item summary in text factories.

• Fixed bug in which words in comments and heredocs in Ruby files weren’t subject to spell checking, as they should have been.

• Made an assortment of changes to improve multi-file process performance.

• Made a change to significantly improve performance when looking for a coding: variable in an Emacs mode line or variable block. This reduces overhead in multi-file operations.

• Made changes to improve literal (non-Grep) text searching performance for multi-file search and other “find all” situations.

• Made some small efficiency improvements to file reading.

• Made some changes to slightly reduce file system overhead during multi-file operations.

• Fixed uncaught exception which would occur when cancelling privilege escalation while trying to save a file located in the Trash.

• Improved results when using multi-word search terms in the Settings window. You can use wildcards now too, if you want.

• Made a change to the behavior of “Open Selection”, so that automatic filename extension selection doesn’t occur if the thing that looks like a filename extension isn’t actually known to the OS.

• Made some efficiency improvements in the Markdown parser to improve performance on very large files (multiple megabytes).

• The merch link in the about box goes directly to the merch site, rather than to a landing page.

• Fixed non-blinking insertion point cursor in source control commit windows.

• Improve handling of application-specific URLs and such items dragged in from URL clipping (.inetloc) files in projects.

• Fixed bug in which multiple “additional edits” returned with language server completions were not applied correctly.

• Xcode folder references (new in recent versions) are now properly loaded when enumerating the contents of an Xcode project.

• Worked around FB16415546, which caused truncation of very large files (over 2GB on disk) when doing Add/Remove Line Numbers (and also Tidy operations).

• Handle block comments and character escapes in Lisp files.

• Made a change so that AppleScript execution, whether implicit (as in Startup Items or text factories) or explicit (via the Script menu or other UI invocation) will fail if the script file has been quarantined by macOS.

• If a project contains references to any Finder saved searches, these will be evaluated when using the project as a multi-file search source.

• When committing a submodule, the branch name in the navigation bar will reflect the name of the submodule branch being committed (rather than the branch of the enclosing repository).

• Made a change to improve performance of the test used to enable the stash-related commands on the Git menu.

• Saved application state includes cheat sheets, so these will reopen in their last-used locations across an application quit/relaunch.

• Made a change to improve robustness of LSP interactions when the server exits unexpectedly; this should resolve reports of hanging during attempted completions.

• Allow display paths in the Multi-File Search window to occupy as much width is available when the window is widened.

• Corrected appearance of the icon in the “Recently Used Items” heading in the Open Recent submenu, when running in Dark Mode.

• Made a change so that presence of certain Objective-C macros in a header file will improve the accuracy of guessing Objective-C/C++.

• Fixed bug in which double-clicking on an item in the “Find Symbol in Workspace” panel did not dismiss the panel and select the corresponding item.

• Worked around a bug in the macOS color panel in which the panel would send a spurious notification when closing the Settings window after changing a color setting’s opacity. This in turn resulted in an unexpected color value being inserted in the active document.

• Fixed bug in the PHP color scanner which would cause unexpected selection effects when double-clicking on a word that occurred after a __halt_compiler() directive in the file.

• Fixed bug in which starting to drag an item from an inactive list in the sidebar would move keyboard focus there, which often resulted in unexpected file selection behaviors.

• Fixed spurious behavior of the “Collapse Folds Below Level” submenu.

• Fixed internal exceptions and other misbehavior that would occur after deleting a customized AI chat API model that had been set for use as the default or referenced by existing worksheets.

• Ensure that the selection range is properly in view when (re)opening a document which was soft wrapped to the window width.

• Corrected misleading tooltips in the Grep search pattern cheat sheet.

• Ensure that the selection range is properly in view when (re)opening a document which was soft wrapped to the window width.

• Fixed bug in which changing a text color setting in the preferences didn’t update the display of the list view in the Settings window.

• Abbreviate (if necessary) the search string/pattern for “not found” multi-file search alerts, to avoid a macOS alert layout bug (FB8924294) that places the “OK” button offscreen.

• Made some performance improvements to HTML document type identification from strings in the <!DOCTYPE> declaration.

• Improved the logic which generates qualified file name displays in the sidebar for currently open documents.

• Honor “Auto-expand tabs” for built-in formatting implemented by the language module.

BBEdit 15.1.4 Release Notes

BBEdit 15.1.4 contains fixes for reported issues.

For details on all the new features and enhancements available in BBEdit 15, please see the release notes for BBEdit 15.0.

Because BBEdit 15 builds on features that were added during the BBEdit 14 cycle (as well as previous versions), please take a few moments to browse the release notes archive and review the release notes for any versions that you may not have seen.

To get a high-level overview of what’s new in BBEdit 15, with screen shots, see the What’s New in BBEdit 15 page.

For detailed information on using any of BBEdit’s features, please refer to the user manual (choose “User Manual” from BBEdit’s Help menu).

Important: Please make sure that you have read the BBEdit 15.0 change notes, as there are significant changes from previous versions.

Requirements

BBEdit 15 requires Mac OS X 11.0 or later.

For whichever version of macOS you are using, please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version.

This is particularly important in the case of macOS Sonoma (14.x), which contains bugs and regressions that affect BBEdit’s operation.

Upgrading

If you have been using any previous generation of BBEdit in Free Mode, starting BBEdit 15 will reset your 30-day evaluation period, so that you can have a full trial of the new features.

If you have previously purchased a license from us for BBEdit 14 or older, you will have a full 30-day evaluation period in which to try out BBEdit 15’s new features. License upgrades are available at a discount for existing customers, and some customers may be eligible for a free upgrade (based on date of purchase). Please see the BBEdit upgrades page for information and instructions.

Additions/Changes

This update contains only fixes for reported issues.

Fixes

• Made a change so that AppleScript execution, whether implicit (as in Startup Items or text factories) or explicit (via the Script menu or other UI invocation) will fail if the script file has been quarantined by macOS.

fin

BBEdit 15.1.3 contains fixes for reported issues.

For details on all the new features and enhancements available in BBEdit 15, please see the release notes for BBEdit 15.0.

Because BBEdit 15 builds on features that were added during the BBEdit 14 cycle (as well as previous versions), please take a few moments to browse the release notes archive and review the release notes for any versions that you may not have seen.

To get a high-level overview of what’s new in BBEdit 15, with screen shots, see the What’s New in BBEdit 15 page.

For detailed information on using any of BBEdit’s features, please refer to the user manual (choose “User Manual” from BBEdit’s Help menu).

Important: Please make sure that you have read the BBEdit 15.0 change notes, as there are significant changes from previous versions.

Requirements

BBEdit 15 requires Mac OS X 11.0 or later.

For whichever version of macOS you are using, please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version.

This is particularly important in the case of macOS Sonoma (14.x), which contains bugs and regressions that affect BBEdit’s operation.

Upgrading

If you have been using any previous generation of BBEdit in Free Mode, starting BBEdit 15 will reset your 30-day evaluation period, so that you can have a full trial of the new features.

If you have previously purchased a license from us for BBEdit 14 or older, you will have a full 30-day evaluation period in which to try out BBEdit 15’s new features. License upgrades are available at a discount for existing customers, and some customers may be eligible for a free upgrade (based on date of purchase). Please see the BBEdit upgrades page for information and instructions.

Additions/Changes

This update contains only fixes for reported issues.

Fixes

• Fixed typo in an expert preference defaults entry.
• Updated the entitlements in the App Store build to include /opt/homebrew/Cellar/ and /opt/homebrew/opt/, so that Homebrew binaries are usable without requiring explicit sandbox access.
• Fixed bug in which closing a live preview window would fail to save any customizations to preview filter/template/CSS selections.
• Fixed display name of the OpenPDFsAsText expert preference.
• Made a change so that the OpenPDFsAsText expert preference takes effect without requiring an application relaunch; turning this setting off will override the PDF language module’s built-in mapping.
• Corrected display of some header entries in the Open Recent submenu.
• Fixed hang which would occur in the Rust language module when a where clause in a function header was at EOF.
• Fixed bug in which the -Z (--null) output option in bbfind(1) did not work as intended.
• Made a change so that the application unconditionally restores window positions when starting up with saved application state, even if the display layout isn’t what it was the last time the application was quit.
• Fixed bug in which bash numeric base specifiers would confuse syntax coloring and function scanning.
• Fixed bug in which creating a new file in an instaproject folder didn’t select the newly created file in the Project list in cases where the selected or right-clicked item was another file.
• Made a change to “Cascade Left” so that the windows start at the right-hand side of the display, rather than somewhere in the middle.
• Corrected display of qualifiers in the custom language preferences when a status bar setting was changed.
• Fixed bug in which CSS syntax coloring didn’t recognize negative floating-point numbers without a leading zero (e.g. -.10).
• Correct coloring of identifiers in CSS at-rule specifiers.
• Various CSS keyword additions and updates.
• Fixed bug in which project windows would open at an infinite width in cases where the editor view had been hidden when the project was closed.
• Fixed crash which would occur while saving FTP/SFTP bookmarks after creating or editing a bookmark, when (any) one of the saved bookmarks was malformed.
• Fixed missing text for the “Remove Blank Lines” item summary in text factories.
• When the string entered into “Open File by Name” contains slashes (for separating path elements), BBEdit will wildcard the intermediate path elements, so that it’s no longer necessary to precisely specify each directory along the path to the file. (This does not guarantee a match, but improves flexibility.)
• Fixed bug in which words in comments and heredocs in Ruby files weren’t subject to spell checking, as they should have been.
• When using a http/https download URL (from the command line or Open File by Name), determine the file type based on the resource name so that image files open as images rather than as binary data.
• Fixed latent bug in which backslash character escapes in files being evaluated as possible JSON documents would potentially cause the guesser to access unmapped memory and crash.
• Fixed bug in which selecting a top-level window from the Windows palette would select an arbitrary document in the window, rather than simply activating the window itself.
• Added a “date opened” property to documents, corresponding to when the document was opened (or, for untitled documents, created). This could hypothetically be used in scripts which process documents opened more (or less) than a desired time interval ago.
• Fixed a drawing glitch when resizing the sidebar in Notes windows.
• Window cascading no longer clamps the maximum width of the cascaded windows, so whatever width was chosen by “Save Default Window” will take effect.
• When creating a new Note, keyboard focus is now placed intentionally in the text area, rather than (possibly) being allowed to remain in the sidebar.
• Added some new predefined names for Go.
• Make backslash escaping in a search results window title consistent with the escaping used in the summary display.
• Added a “kill switch” for AI Worksheets. When employed, BBEdit will not be able to open existing AI worksheets or create new ones, nor are the corresponding preferences available. Use the following Terminal command, and then restart the application:

defaults write com.barebones.bbedit DisableAIChatWorksheets -bool YES

• Made an adjustment to the HTML language guesser to improve accuracy when guessing for “PHP in HTML”.
• Allow underscore as a digit separator in JavaScript numeric literals.

fin

BBEdit 15.1.2 contains fixes for reported issues.

For details on all the new features and enhancements available in BBEdit 15, please see the release notes for BBEdit 15.0.

Because BBEdit 15 builds on features that were added during the BBEdit 14 cycle (as well as previous versions), please take a few moments to browse the release notes archive and review the release notes for any versions that you may not have seen.

To get a high-level overview of what’s new in BBEdit 15, with screen shots, see the What’s New in BBEdit 15 page.

For detailed information on using any of BBEdit’s features, please refer to the user manual (choose “User Manual” from BBEdit’s Help menu).

Important: Please make sure that you have read the BBEdit 15.0 change notes, as there are significant changes from previous versions.

Requirements

BBEdit 15 requires Mac OS X 11.0 or later.

For whichever version of macOS you are using, please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version.

This is particularly important in the case of macOS Sonoma (14.x), which contains bugs and regressions that affect BBEdit’s operation.

Upgrading

If you have been using any previous generation of BBEdit in Free Mode, starting BBEdit 15 will reset your 30-day evaluation period, so that you can have a full trial of the new features.

If you have previously purchased a license from us for BBEdit 14 or older, you will have a full 30-day evaluation period in which to try out BBEdit 15’s new features. License upgrades are available at a discount for existing customers, and some customers may be eligible for a free upgrade (based on date of purchase). Please see the BBEdit upgrades page for information and instructions.

Additions & Changes

This update contains only fixes for reported issues.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug in which autorecovery didn’t work as intended in some limited situations where the document was already open (as could happen with state restoration).
• Added .swiftinterface as a default filename extension for Swift.
• Added any and some to the Swift keyword list.
• Fixed bug in which turning on the Editor_AlwaysOpenQuickFind expert preference would inappropriately also make the sidebar visible.
• Fixed internal exception which would occur when trying to open a project or notebook, and the file system permissions didn’t permit access.
• Made a change to the HTML guesser so that excessively large files aren’t eligible for guesswork. (If it opens as plain text, give it an appropriate filename extension, or manually change the language setting in the status bar.)
• Added missing sub selector to the CSS syntax coloring.
• Fixed regression in which dragging an image into an untitled HTML document would not insert anything.
• Updated the built-in PCRE2 library, which includes corrections to \b, \w, and friends when matching Unicode.
• Fixed bug in which programmatic window move/resize (such as setting the bounds property using AppleScript) would result in drawing glitches in cases where the operation moved the window to another screen as well as changing its shape.
• Corrected the default source format profile entry for so that it formats as an inline element, as intended.
• Fixed bug in which using the Option key to bypass the “Process Lines Containing” dialog box did not correctly preserve the “do not contain” setting, if it had been previously turned on.
• Fixed bug in which completion symbols with backslashes in their names would display with line breaks and other inappropriate characters in situations where the backslash was followed by something like “r” or “n”.
• Fixed clipping of below-baseline characters in some fonts with oddball metrics (such as underscores in Courier New 11).
• Fixed bug in which selecting an SVG file in a Zip or tarball browser would not display its contents.
• The “Go to Line” panels will now disregard commas and periods in entered line numbers, because that’s apparently a thing.
• Adjusted the Entities floater so that the list is unable to scroll horizontally, which prevents it from twitching when a horizontal-scroll gesture occurs while the mouse is over the list.
• Made layout adjustments to the Entities floater so as to avoid column title truncation when highlighting different sort orders.
• Fixed bug in which attempting to change editing options for a soft-wrapped document would fail in cases where the document also had a rectangular selection.
• Made a change to allow processing of bidirectional text during layout and drawing, which corrects rendering behavior with right-to-left text.
• Fixed bug in which double-clicking on an inline fold indicator would not expand the fold in cases where the indicator was within the selection range.
• Fixed a concurrency bug which would (rarely, and sporadically) cause a crash during startup.
• Fixed bug in which line comments immediately after an unqualified JavaScript function’s signature would cause the function scanner to omit that function from the menu.
• Fixed bug in which per-document print settings were not correctly loaded from saved document state across invocations of the print panel, when running on recent macOS versions.
• Fixed bug in which the active document would be marked as changed during a multi-file replace or Text Factory operation, in cases where the actual document being changed was open in the same window (but not active).
• Fixed bug in which creating a project collection by right-clicking on the top-level project item and choosing “New Collection” from the contextual menu would create the collection at the wrong level (and fail to retain it in the project).
• Fixed bug in which line comments immediately after an unqualified JavaScript function’s signature would cause the function scanner to omit that function from the menu.
• Fixed bug in which per-document print settings were not correctly loaded from saved document state across invocations of the print panel, when running on recent macOS versions.
• Corrected enabling of items on the View menu which correspond to usable contextual menu commands in the sidebar (when it has keyboard focus).
• Fixed bug in which sync scrolling in Differences windows didn’t sync scroll when the application was in the background.
• Changes to certain site deployment settings will reset the upload state, so that subsequent deployment properly redeploys all of the files.
• Made a change so that the FTP client code will always unconditionally log errors. As before, extended logging can be turned on using FTPEnableLogging, but this should be done only on the advice of Tech Support.
• Made a change to improve the accuracy of identical-file detection when performing folder comparisons, in cases where the “[Ignore] All [Spaces]” option was turned on and the files differed only in white space.
• Worked around bug in macOS 14 Stage Manager, whose primary manifestation was causing “Go to Line” to do its operation in the window behind the active document’s window.
• Change the project window display to “No Editor” if a non-displayable file is selected in the Project section of the sidebar.
• Fixed a logic error which led to mismanagement of file filter settings in the Multi-File Search and Find Differences windows.
• Disable scrolling acceleration modifiers when using menu key equivalents for the text view scrolling commands, in case one of them contains an acceleration modifier (Command or Option).
• Made a change to nominally improve word counting performance with a rectangular selection spanning a large number of lines.
• Made a change to significantly improve performance and reduce memory consumption when counting words in very large rectangular selections.
• Made a change to slightly improve text measuring performance (for selection calculations and other purposes).
• Corrected the display title of the “always show the live search bar” expert preference.
• Fixed bug in which multiple untitled documents with the same name would erroneously add a “/” path qualifier to the displayed name.
• Made a change so that the application quits when asked to by the Shortcuts “quit app” operation.
• Worked around macOS API bug which caused mishandling of FTP listings which contained UTF-8 file names.
• Worked around OpenAI breaking API change which caused an error when attempting to save an AI worksheet (and which also prevented autosaving from working for AI worksheets).

NB: This involved making a non-backward-compatible change to the on-disk representation. 15.1.2 and later can read old AI worksheet files, but 15.1.1 and earlier will not be able to read worksheet files created by 15.1.2 and later.

• Made a correctness change regarding the handling of data-load tasks associated with a live preview window.
• Fixed bug in which attempting to create a new project would fail (reporting “you don’t have permission”) in App Store builds when sandbox access had not been granted.

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BBEdit 15.1.1 contains fixes for reported issues.

For details on all the new features and enhancements available in BBEdit 15, please see the release notes for BBEdit 15.0.

Because BBEdit 15 builds on features that were added during the BBEdit 14 cycle (as well as previous versions), please take a few moments to browse the release notes archive and review the release notes for any versions that you may not have seen.

To get a high-level overview of what’s new in BBEdit 15, with screen shots, see the What’s New in BBEdit 15 page.

For detailed information on using any of BBEdit’s features, please refer to the user manual (choose “User Manual” from BBEdit’s Help menu).

Important: Please make sure that you have read the BBEdit 15.0 change notes, as there are significant changes from previous versions.

Requirements

BBEdit 15 requires Mac OS X 11.0 or later.

For whichever version of macOS you are using, please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version.

This is particularly important in the case of macOS Sonoma (14.x), which contains bugs and regressions that affect BBEdit’s operation.

Upgrading

If you have been using any previous generation of BBEdit in Free Mode, starting BBEdit 15 will reset your 30-day evaluation period, so that you can have a full trial of the new features.

If you have previously purchased a license from us for BBEdit 14 or older, you will have a full 30-day evaluation period in which to try out BBEdit 15’s new features. License upgrades are available at a discount for existing customers, and some customers may be eligible for a free upgrade (based on date of purchase). Please see the BBEdit upgrades page for information and instructions.

Additions & Changes

This update contains only fixes for reported issues.

Fixes

• Added async, await, and actor to the Swift keyword list.
• The Swift function scanner no longer omits actor definitions from the listing.
• Fixed regression in which “Open Counterpart” would not find counterparts in cases where Xcode was unavailable for consultation.
• Adjusted default width proportions of new windows (to make them a little wider). As always, “Save Default Window” on the Window menu is appropriate for individual configuration.
• Fixed bug in which the Git “pull current branch” and “push current branch” commands didn’t actually do anything.
• Report an appropriate error when trying to save a file with Unicode line endings (which aren’t supported for saving).
• The minimap no longer attempts to display invisibles (which would not have worked well).
• Added gpt-4o to the built-in model list for ChatGPT. (You could always enter it manually if needed; this just saves a step.)
• Fixed cases in which switching between documents didn’t correctly update the status in the Live Search bar.
• Improved path truncation logic in the Open File by Name results window. Additionally, Xcode SDK headers are elided using the same logic as in the navigation bar, for improved readibility.
• Disk browsers and “instaprojects” (created by opening a folder directly) remember their positions when closed, and when the same directory is browsed or opened again, BBEdit will reopen the window in that position.
• Fixed crash when running on macOS 14 Intel and using a double-click on a list item to dismiss the panel invoked “Compare Against Previous Version”.
• Fixed crash when running on macOS 14 Intel and using a double-click on a list item to dismiss the panel invoked by the “Other” option in the text encoding status bar item.
• Corrected default splitter proportion for results windows, in the absence of a previous “Saved Default Window” command invocation for same.
• Fixed bug in which dismissing the Live Search bar would place keyboard focus in the sidebar (if allowed), rather than (more usefully) in the associated text area.
• Fixed bug in which the progress information in a Multi-File Search results window would move around unpredictably when reshaping the window while a search was in progress.
• Markup => Preview in => New Text Window has been returned to working order.

fin

BBEdit 15.1 contains feature additions, refinements to existing features, and fixes for reported issues.

For details on all the new features and enhancements available in BBEdit 15, please see the release notes for BBEdit 15.0.

Because BBEdit 15 builds on features that were added during the BBEdit 14 cycle (as well as previous versions), please take a few moments to browse the release notes archive and review the release notes for any versions that you may not have seen.

To get a high-level overview of what’s new in BBEdit 15, with screen shots, see the What’s New in BBEdit 15 page.

For detailed information on using any of BBEdit’s features, please refer to the user manual (choose “User Manual” from BBEdit’s Help menu).

Important: Please make sure that you have read the BBEdit 15.0 change notes, as there are significant changes from previous versions.

Requirements

BBEdit 15 requires Mac OS X 11.0 or later.

For whichever version of macOS you are using, please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version.

This is particularly important in the case of macOS Sonoma (14.x), which contains bugs and regressions that affect BBEdit’s operation.

Upgrading

If you have been using any previous version of BBEdit in Free Mode, starting BBEdit 15.0 will reset your 30-day evaluation period, so that you can have a full trial of the new features.

If you have previously purchased a license from us for BBEdit 14 or older, you will have a full 30-day evaluation period in which to try out BBEdit 15’s new features. License upgrades are available at a discount for existing customers, and some customers may be eligible for a free upgrade (based on date of purchase). Please see the BBEdit upgrades page for information and instructions.

Additions

• “ChatGPT Worksheets” are branching out; the renamed “AI Chat Worksheet” preferences provide settings to select alternative services. Included with the application are service models for ChatGPT, Claude, and Ollama.

You can also add your own services and endpoints, as long as they use an API that is compatible with OpenAI’s (or close enough that BBEdit can’t tell the difference). Information on how to do this is provided in this technical note.

The title of the command on the New submenu of the file menu will reflect the currently selected default service, e.g. “New ChatGPT Worksheet”, “New Claude Worksheet”, “New Ollama Worksheet”.

The status bar item for AI worksheets shows the service name along with the model name. You can switch services in an AI chat worksheet, and also clear the chat/response history if desired. (This may be necessary in cases where enough history accumulates that the service rejects or limits request lengths.)

Changing services requires clearing the history.

• Added a “Decompose Unicode” transformation.
• Added a setting to the “Expert” settings panel list so that it only shows values that have been changed from their factory defaults.
• Added binding points for the remaining dynamic commands on the “Insert” submenu to the Menus & Shortcuts preferences.

Changes

• Rearranged the Languages preferences panel to make more room for custom language settings as well as for customized filename extension mappings.
• Improved soft wrapping behavior when wrapping to the Page Guide and a variable-pitch font is in use. (Note that when using such a font, the notion of wrapping to a fixed number of characters doesn’t apply, so the actual position of the page guide is approximated.)
• BBEdit will now try to automatically guess JSON, so that if you paste some into an untitled document, you won’t have to remember to manually set the language if you want to use “Reformat Document” to pretty-print it.
• Reworked the default placement and size of new document windows; they are now centered in the main display and occupy a less-than-total fraction of the available display height. As always, you can use the “Save Default Window” command on BBEdit’s Window command to establish your preferred size and placement for any window type.
• If a file is opened from inside of the Xcode platform/SDK tree, the document path in the navigation bar will be condensed to elide irrelevant path elements, in order to save space.
• When the mouse is over an area where single-clicking selects a line, BBEdit will change the cursor to a reversed arrow. (This restores an old feature that went out with the bathwater a long time ago.)
• Assigned keyboard equivalents (as configured in the Menus & Shortcuts preferences) are stored now as a JSON file, which should work around macOS APIs crashing if the old binary plist format gets corrupted or conflicted.

Fixes

• Fixed bug in which “Update Site” on a project might generate incorrect results for site-relative placeholders (such as REAL_URL) when multiple projects were open and the affected files were present in more than one of the open projects.
• Fixed misfeature in which PHP superglobal references were colored as predefined symbols, which prevented double-click variable selection from working for them.
• Fixed crash at startup which would occur with certain malformations in ~/.zshrc.
• Changes to improve performance when iterating large directories in disk browsers and project window folder listings.
• Made some performance improvements to the “is a Zip archive” and “is a tarball” tests.
• Prompts sent to the chat API are now stored in the history only after the API responds affirmatively. This ensures API behavior correctness in the wake of errors (timeouts, account limits, or otherwise).
• Restored the ability to configure keyboard equivalents for Insert Time Stamp (short and long) and Insert Page Break that was lost in rearchitecture with 15.0.
• Fixed a typo in an error message that might occur while trying to install the command line tools.
• Fixed bug when stutter-clicking on the “+” menu button under the per-language settings in the Languages preferences.
• Corrected omission of the feed ARIA role from the global attribute value list.
• Changing the page guide width in the Preferences will trigger rewrapping in documents for which Soft Wrap Text is turned on and Page Guide is selected as the limit.

fin

BBEdit 15.0.3 contains fixes for reported issues.

For details on all the new features and enhancements available in BBEdit 15, please see the release notes for BBEdit 15.0.

Because BBEdit 15 builds on features that were added during the BBEdit 14 cycle (as well as previous versions), please take a few moments to browse the release notes archive and review the release notes for any versions that you may not have seen.

To get a high-level overview of what’s new in BBEdit 15, with screen shots, see the What’s New in BBEdit 15 page.

For detailed information on using any of BBEdit’s features, please refer to the user manual (choose “User Manual” from BBEdit’s Help menu).

Important: Please make sure that you have read the BBEdit 15.0 change notes, as there are significant changes from previous versions.

Requirements

BBEdit 15 requires Mac OS X 11.0 or later.

For whichever version of macOS you are using, please make sure that you have updated to the latest available OS version.

This is particularly important in the case of macOS Sonoma (14.x), which contains bugs and regressions that affect BBEdit’s operation.

Upgrading

If you have been using any previous version of BBEdit in Free Mode, starting BBEdit 15.0 will reset your 30-day evaluation period, so that you can have a full trial of the new features.

If you have previously purchased a license from us for BBEdit 14 or older, you will have a full 30-day evaluation period in which to try out BBEdit 15’s new features. License upgrades are available at a discount for existing customers, and some customers may be eligible for a free upgrade (based on date of purchase). Please see the BBEdit upgrades page for information and instructions.

Additions & Changes

This update contains only fixes for reported issues.

Fixes

• Fixed bug in which line comments at the end of the file in R and Unix Shell Script source files weren’t colored as such unless the file ended with a line break.
• Worked around macOS 14 misbehavior which prevented the application from activating when invoked by bbdiff --wait.
• Fixed bug in which closing the active document didn’t always select the next eligible document, leaving a “No Editor” placeholder.
• Made some changes to improve performance when opening the “related files” (counterparts) navigation bar menu when the directory containing the document had a lot of other files in it.
• Reverted the 15.0.2 change to default-tag-formatting behavior of the HTML pretty printer, which ended up causing more problems than it solved.
• Fixed 15.0.2 regression which would cause a hang while making certain edits with the minimap open.
• Fix a bug that caused the Minimap to highlight both the current and previous lines when the insertion point is at the start of a line.
• Made a change in the minimap so that punctuation isn’t greeked, which helps improve visualization.
• “Compare Two Front Windows” will no longer report an error if either (or both) documents is a (shell or ChatGPT) worksheet.
• Worked around a suspected compiler regression which caused typographer’s quotes insertion to malfunction.
• Worked around a misbehavior in the macOS security system which would cause spurious ““BBEdit.app” was prevented from modifying apps on your Mac” warnings when opening SDK headers (or other files inside application bundles) when starting the application or using “Open File by Name”.

fin