Bare Bones has shipped BBEdit 16, a major update to the text editor that has outlived nearly everything else on my Mac. The release notes count more than 100 new features and refinements.

The headline feature is text search inside images. BBEdit can now run its search engine, grep patterns and all, against the text living in image files on disk. Rich Siegel says this one came from his own routine: “Searching for text inside images, for example, addresses a real need that I encounter routinely”. Anyone who has ever tried to find that one screenshot of an error message knows exactly what he means.

Shortcuts support also goes much deeper this time. BBEdit’s text transformations are now available as actions powered by App Intents, so you can sort lines, process duplicates, find or delete lines matching a pattern, and run a grep-powered Replace All from inside a shortcut. BBEdit has always been a power tool. Now its text-processing brain is available to your automations without opening the app.

There’s plenty more. Notebooks get filtering with built-in indexing for fast searches. Projects and notebooks can carry their own color schemes so you can tell workspaces apart at a glance. There’s support for the W3C HTML checker, vi keyboard emulation for those who want it, and AI worksheet responses that now stream in rather than landing all at once.

BBEdit 16 requires macOS Sonoma or later. It’s $59.99 new, $29.99 to upgrade from version 15, and $39.99 from version 14 or earlier. If you bought BBEdit 15 on or after November 1, 2025, the upgrade is free. There’s also a 30-day full-featured trial if you’ve never given it a spin.

I’ve been using BBEdit in one form or another for decades, and updates like this are why. It doesn’t suck. It never has.