There are more than a hundred new feature additions, changes, and refinements, including forward-looking foundational work which brings order-of-magnitude performance improvements in some parts of the product.
I’ve been using BBEdit for its entire 30-plus year history (I was building websites with it in 1994). It’s by far my most-used third-party app. I would be lost without it. I updated immediately.
The headline new features include:
- Expanded Shortcuts support (“makes BBEdit’s powerful text transformations even more available to workflows outside of the application”).
- Search for text in images (“Multi-file search for text in images. Yes. Multi-file search for text in images using grep. Mmmhmmm.”)
- Color Customizations for Projects and Notebooks (“Help keep things straight using color as a guide, with the new ability to select a color scheme per-project (and per-Notebook).”)
As is tradition for Bare Bones, the release notes are extensive, detailing the plethora of changes in this update.
BBEdit 16 is a free upgrade for BBEdit 15 customers who purchased on or after November 1, 2025, and a paid upgrade for customers who bought before then ($29.99 for BBEdit 15 customers, $39.99 for BBEdit customers with 14.6.9 or earlier). It’s also available in the Mac App Store via subscription.
(Worth mentioning whether or not you’re in the market for a text editor: BBEdit offers one of the most generous free tiers I’ve seen in an app. A significant amount of BBEdit’s functionality can be used completely for free, including its powerful grep text manipulation. It’s a tool worth keeping handy.)