BBEdit 16

207

qqaz_plm about 3 hours ago 59 commentsRead Article on barebones.com

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

88% Positive

Analyzed from 1714 words in the discussion.

Discussion (59 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

kennywinker•about 2 hours ago

In 1998 bbedit 5.0 cost $120 usd. Adjusted for inflation that would be about $245 usd.

Today an individual license costs $60.

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

pokstad•about 1 hour ago

The software world is different today. People expect you to release security updates as vulnerabilities are discovered. They expect you to fix your application so that it works on the newest macOS that deprecated and broke the old APIs you used (or switch architectures). We expect continuous maintenance for a fixed price. I wish Textmate had a yearly charge to keep their team running instead of the one time purchase that starved them.

nofunsir•25 minutes ago

You're making this up to justify subscription model guilt. Nobody (besides those on here) EXPECTS this. In fact, most would rather live with the risks than deal with subscription model, let alone the headaches of updating and it breaking everything (i.e. causing a chain reaction that you have to update EVERYTHING in order to fix a small non-issue).

I, in fact, do NOT want continuous maintenance. Ever. I will literally never turn on auto-updates for the rest of my life.

hgs3•about 1 hour ago

I think there is one major difference that separates the two eras: in ye olden days you bought software for a fixed price and while it's understood you might only receive updates for a limited time, you could continue using it so long as you had the ability to run it. For example, you didn't have to upgrade to Windows XP if you were satisfied with Windows 98. With subscriptions, it's a recurring fee to continue accessing the software at all.

pokstad•about 1 hour ago

Windows sells more copies of its software the OEM route. Also, they sell specific versions that eventually end support. Today you might consider Windows almost a loss leader since Microsoft is diversified with many services on top of windows.

jms703•32 minutes ago

Yep. Give people two choices.

1) Purchase a major version and get no updates.

2) Purchase a subscription and get constant updates.

bayindirh•24 minutes ago

Or use "The Dutch Model":

Pay for the major version, get all of its updates. Then pay for update (to next major plus its updates) with a discount.

If you don't prefer the pay, you can keep what you have.

This is what BBEdit, Forklift, CameraBag and countless others do, and it works very well.

bellowsgulch•about 1 hour ago

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

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

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

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

conductr•3 minutes ago

BBEdit is a small private company, no VCs. They probably make a ton of cash for the owners at this point and doing right by their customers and not rocking the boat through profit maximization strategies is a long term play that VCs could not put up with.

wlesieutre•about 1 hour ago

Unfortunately Apple doesn’t allow paid updates short of releasing a whole separate app, and you can’t do upgrade discounts for current owners except via weird bundle discounts by sticking the new and old versions together as a package. So Apple is to blame for all the subscriptions.

reaperducer•33 minutes ago

We're talking about a macOS program, where companies don't have to bother with Apple's rules to sell their software, so your comment is off-topic.

Panic is good example of this kind of pricing.

Nova is $99 (last I checked), and gets updates for a year. After that, it's $75 for another year of updates.

If you don't want to update, you don't have to. You can even update every second or third year or whatever you want and catch up with all the missing features and updates.

Let's not just throw up our hands and say, "Oh, well. Apple makes me do this, so there's nothing I can do." Innovate.

kstrauser•about 1 hour ago

No other professional field I know of lets workers invent and alter their own tools, collaboratively, for free, and share them for free with all their colleagues.

If surgeons could wiggle their fingers and make a better scalpel, at no cost, and give a copy to all their friends, also at no cost, I bet they'd have some pretty spiffy scalpels going around soon and many docs would stop paying for them.

bellowsgulch•11 minutes ago

Your comment is hilarious, because of the people most suited to manufacture a better scalpel, it's people in healthcare because of their income being in the 1% of individual compensation distribution.

Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.

Where is this mythical no cost software you're talking about? Is it in the room with us right now?

doublerabbit•about 1 hour ago

> No other professional field I know of lets workers invent and alter their own tools, collaboratively, for free, and share them for free with all their colleagues.

Blacksmithing, metal working?

kennywinker•about 1 hour ago

Implying that one of the oldest still actively developed commercial text editors is not doing sustainable business practices kinda misses the mark. They’ve been at this since 1992, 34 years ago. I think they know their business.

bellowsgulch•about 1 hour ago

Yeah, I think I know their business, too. Remember 12 years ago when BBEdit left the Mac App Store only later to come back with subscriptions? Boo.

[1]: https://x.com/smorr/status/521033038713880576

[2]: https://www.barebones.com/company/press/bbedit_back_to_mas_p...

browningstreet•about 1 hour ago

Customer acquisition and retention is so very hard and expensive. It’s a tough equation.

vl•27 minutes ago

And amazingly free version is very usable as well. It’s same BBEdit package, and without license it doesn’t activate extra features, which I don’t need anyway. They used to ship it as free separate editor TextWrangler and now rolled it in into main BBEdit instead.

factorialboy•about 2 hours ago

The pie (market) has also vastly expanded since 1998. Need to factor that, and not just inflation.

kennywinker•about 1 hour ago

I assumed that was implied pretty heavily by what I said. Either they were overcharging in 1998, or the market got bigger.

sedatk•about 2 hours ago

Proportionally, competition has vastly expanded too.

LeoPanthera•about 2 hours ago

My search for a "just a text editor" ended with "CotEditor". It's Mac native, not Electron, and supports both RTL and vertical text. All I could ever want.

ChrisMarshallNY•33 minutes ago

I just checked, and it looks like I have been using BBEdit for almost 35 years (It was initially shareware).

Siegel still manages it (I don't know if he is still the main coder). He never sold out.

classichasclass•about 3 hours ago

Proud user since the classic Mac OS days (anyone else remember the OpenDoc version?), and it's still a solid editor at a good price.

Cassell•about 2 hours ago

TextWrangler!

sigzero•about 2 hours ago

Same. Recently moved to Windows (blah) but if I move back, that's a purchase for me.

kstrauser•about 2 hours ago

I use Zed more now, but BBEdit's still pretty great. I love, love, LOVE that I can extend it with shell scripts or Python tools or Rust apps or whatever else I have laying around. Sometimes I don't want to write a whole plugin, let alone in JavaScript or whatever. I just want to say "process this text with this tool" and have it work. BBEdit's second to none for that.

skydhash•about 1 hour ago

That’s the power of vim, emacs, nano, and I think Kate too. Piping the current text and/or collecting the output of a given comment.

Another nice thing is the ability to collect paths, line and column numbers from the output for navigation.

kstrauser•about 1 hour ago

For sure. I use Emacs regularly too, and of course it supports this kind of thing. BBEdit makes it flat out pleasant though. I appreciate how well the new additions melt into the UI.

skydhash•about 1 hour ago

I won’t disagree with that, but my daily driver is OpenBSD. Emacs is what I got ;)

_HMCB_•about 3 hours ago

Love to see this app trending on HN.

KenSF•about 2 hours ago

It still doesn't suck.

headwayoldest•about 2 hours ago

I have used and loved Barebones stuff in the past, but strikes me as odd they're still advertising Yojimbo on their main page. It was fantastic, but has been abandoned for quite some time.

sharkjacobs•about 2 hours ago

It's supported for Tahoe. It's still good functional software and this is the ideal right? They're selling finished software for a flat price without needing a subscription model to support continued development.

kstrauser•about 2 hours ago

You were downvoted but right. The changelog[0] shows that the current minor version (4.6) came out in 2020, and its only had 3 bugfix releases since then, most recently in 2023. A lot has changed since 2020, so this doesn't know about the major iCloud updates, or Apple Intelligence, or UI changes (not just talking about Liquid Glass either).

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

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

debugnik•about 2 hours ago

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

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

kstrauser•about 1 hour ago

Yes, and that's universally true for all APIs. All of those have added new features that are widely adopted by other apps, and the older apps can't automagically start using new features without using a newer API, or having code added to take advantage of them.

For instance, an app can't start using Apple Intelligence if it's compiled with an older version of the SDK that doesn't know that such a thing exists. There are some UI exceptions, such as if the OS starts rendering high-level requests like "draw a button" in a newer style. Lots of other things take specific application support, though. MacOS 14 added desktop widgets. Unless an app adds code to configure and deploy widgets, that's not something the OS can do for it. That means that Yojimbo couldn't possibly offer widgets showing, say, the 5 most recently added documents.

If you're OK with not needing or wanting the newer features, and it doesn't rely on some old API that Apple deprecated, then sure, continue to use it! It's still a fine app. But each passing year means that all its updated competitors can do new things that it can't.

Barbing•about 2 hours ago

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

Barebones is great!

steviedotboston•about 2 hours ago

Love BBEdit!

latchkey•about 1 hour ago

i still use it as a quick and dirty text editor for things like my .bashrc

much love for them sticking with it for so long

gnerd00•about 3 hours ago

So great to see this -- the last version of BBedit I paid for is the gold standard for me, for editors... I mean compared to twenty other editors of various kinds on desktop Linux and elsewhere..

jfb•about 3 hours ago

I wonder if it will ever get emacs tabs.

marcelox86•about 2 hours ago

I use emacs but I don't know what you're referring to. Can you enlighten me please

k33n•about 2 hours ago

I think maybe he meant chords.

ndegruchy•about 3 hours ago

> Support for vi keyboard emulation, for basic navigation and editing;

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

dizhn•about 2 hours ago

You can search for text within images.

ndegruchy•20 minutes ago

That is genuinely a neat usage, but I don't find myself needing to search through images for text. I am glad they're still updating and working on BBEdit, but the major revision feels a little flat with features.

submeta•about 2 hours ago

BBEdit used to be my text-transformation tool.

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

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

kstrauser•about 1 hour ago

This really resonates with me. I feel ya. And yet, now those pre-existing tools can make fantastic user interfaces for the new AI-developed things. I just wrote a command line tool to do a thing I needed done, and used Alfred to make a GUI for it. Now it feels like a full-blown GUI, although I just wrote the CLI bits and wrapped them in Alfred.

In BBEdit's case, I could see adding all your new tools as text filters to have a standard way for executing them, either through scripting or in a text window.