
Throughout its history, BBEdit has supported many Apple technologies that failed to gain traction, including OpenDoc and PowerTalk. In 2005, TextWrangler 2.0 was released as freeware and subsequent versions continued to be distributed as such up until 2017, when it was sunsetted and incorporated into BBEdit. Bare Bones Software discontinued BBEdit Lite at version 6.1 and replaced it with TextWrangler, which was available for a fee, although significantly less than BBEdit. BBEdit Lite lacked plugin support, scriptability, syntax coloring and other features then deemed as mainly for advanced users. At the same time, Bare Bones Software also made a less-featured version of BBEdit 2.5 called BBEdit Lite available at no cost. BBEdit was the first freestanding text editor to use the "PE" editing engine, and is the only one still being developed.īBEdit was available at no charge upon its initial release in 1992 but was commercialized in May 1993 with the release of version 2.5. The Macintosh Pascal project was ultimately terminated, but the demonstration program was reworked to use the THINK Technologies "PE" text editing engine used for THINK C, which was much faster and could read larger files. The TextEdit control could not load files larger than 32 KB. The original prototypes of BBEdit used the TextEdit control available in versions of the classic Mac OS of the time. The first version of BBEdit was created as a "bare bones" text editor to serve as a " proof of concept" the intention was to demonstrate the programming capabilities of an experimental version of Pascal for the Macintosh. BBEdit is a proprietary text editor made by Bare Bones Software, originally developed for Macintosh System Software 6, and currently supporting macOS.
