Bare Bones’ legendary text and code editor, BBEdit, was updated for macOS today with a massive list of new features, including text search inside images, expanded Shortcuts automation, streaming AI worksheets, and new customization options. Here are the details.
BBEdit 16 is, unsurprisingly, a big one
As longtime BBEdit users know, Bare Bones doesn’t update the version number of its app willy-nilly. When BBEdit 15 arrived in January 2024, it brought a long list of major additions, including built-in ChatGPT worksheets, the Minimap palette for getting a scaled-down overview of an entire document, expandable Cheat Sheets, Text Merge, and a reworked project system.
Today, BBEdit 16 is being released with an even longer list of new features and improvements, chief among them, in-image text search with support for grep patterns.
This means that users can not only search for text inside screenshots, photos, and other image files directly from BBEdit’s existing multi-file search interface, but also use more advanced pattern matching to find variations of a term, specific text structures, or repeated formatting patterns that a simple keyword search might miss.
