It was a long time since I last used BBEdit. I don’t remember exactly when it was, but it was before I get fully into Vim and then Neovim. It’s funny because this wonderful text editor reminds me of Textmate, but I was not aware of BBEdit at that time despite the fact that it is a native macOS app, that really fits the macOS design (more than some other Apple apps).

Recent versions of BBEdit got LSP support, a project drawer, a note toolkit, and many other additions.

BBEdit is the leading professional HTML and text editor for macOS. This award-winning product has been crafted to serve the needs of writers, Web authors and software developers, and provides an abundance of features for editing, searching, and manipulation of prose, source code, and textual data.

It really is more than capable at editing source code other than markup languages like HTML or XML. Text filters and the regex playground are delightful additions. The fact that you can feed some text or a whole buffer to shell scripts of yours is really what makes this editor appealing, as was the case with Textmate. You get a reliable and snappy editor and you tweak your text with Unix tools and custom pipelines. See these blog posts for more thorough and educated reviews.

LSP support is okay, I mean you get go to definition and references, sometimes code action (e.g., Rust), but no hover information or inlay hints. Hover information is provided by external providers (Google search or Dash if installed). Again, this is fine if you’re looking for a text editor, and not a fully fledged IDE. Plus, my Neovim setup provides all of this for me already. I should note that it is quite easy to add new LSP servers (some are configured by default) if they are already available on your HD, and it works flawlessly once configured in the Preferences pane.

What you really get, however, is a truly macOS app, which includes the “share” functionality, access to common macOS utilities (dictionary, address book, and so on), and all the default keybindings you are used to – except that I use the Vi emulation mode instead of the default Emacs ones. I would say that, compared to Zed, you get a reliable and fast text editor with perfect text rendering which perfectly integrates into the macOS ecosystem. This is not to say that Zed is bad; to be honest, this is the first text editor I’ve seen in the last 15 years that provides so many bounties while feeling so native to the OS. The developers have taken such care over every detail that it’s frustrating to think that far less satisfactory alternatives are being used instead. But Zed focus on collaborative programming and agentic coding, and I’m not into that.

I should note that BBEdit also includes some AI capabilities, in the form of a dedicated worksheet to interact with ChatGPT, Claude or Ollama. Again, I’m not interested in AI chat or assistive coding, for many reasons. Above all, I prefer my 100% human stupidity, to quote someone’s else sayings,¹ and coding haphazardly sometimes. Drew Devault has some thoughts about the use of generative AI in software development, like Brian “Beej” Hall does, but go read On Making. Honorable mention to Bozhidar Batsov as well (see Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI). Anyway, this post is not about AI.

All that to say that BBEdit looks like a well-crafted product, which has proven its worth over the last 30 years, and I’m proud to support the work of a developer who cares about their users so much. When you think about it, it’s fascinating to successfully adapt such a piece of artwork to the successive versions of OS X and macOS.