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.
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.
Mainstream behavior doesn't necessarily mean what people want. Many try and fail to stop Windows updates, for instance. I would guess that the majority of the users of the TicketMaster app would rather not use it.
Hmmm I can’t think of a subscription app that truly doesn’t have a free/upfront/unupgraded alternative - its just that usually they come with quality issues or poor support, so people choose the better, subscription-based, auto-updating ones.
I can think of plenty of apps that have perfectly fine non-subscription options, and then turned subscription only.
People use them because the products were good or industry standard. They don't prefer them because subscriptions somehow magically enabled them to be better.
They already preferred them over alternatives before subscriptions. If anything, people often complain that they got shittier after the subscription was introduced, once many are onboard and captive.
And people use their subscription versions because a non-subscription version is not made available anymore. The real comparison of what users prefer wouldn't be "X subscription software vs Y non-subscription". It would be "X subscription or X non-subscription".
But I think it's not the case incentives are wrong but the reality of business - what do you do when things are feature complete in all the ways that matter?
I dunno, what does Jordan's Furniture do about the fact that the recliner I'm sitting on is feature complete and has been since 2005 and seems to be sturdy enough to last me for the next twenty years? Try to sell me something better, try to sell me different things, try to sell things to other people, and succeed or fail at those goals.
I haven't used a Mac in a bit but I remember liking BBEdit back in the 00s, and it still seems to exist without having a subscription model.
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.
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.
It ignores the point. If I've bought BBEdit 13 for 60 USD three years ago and I'm still happy with it, I can keep using it for the rest of my life without paying more. If I want the new features, then I can pay 40 USD to get the latest version.
This is a sane AND a sustainable model for companies, and actually creates MORE incentives for the developers to align with the user's interest: if the new update sucks and has features no one asked for, then nobody will pay for the new version and keep the old one.
There is no reason why previous versions of the software you paid a license for should effectively "disappear".
I’m a fan of the subscription model where if you stop paying, you continue to have a license for the last version you got during the subscription.
I’ve appreciated that in a few apps where my need for them on a daily basis evaporated but I still need to briefly touch that system once every few months.
I’m a big fan of JetBrains model for this. Buy the software on a subscription, and the subscription gets cheaper for the first 3 annual renewals. While you’re subscribed you get access to the most current version and when you stop subscribing you have a lifetime license for the latest major version (and it’s patches) that you’ve paid for at least a year of. The subscription helps fund the continuous development that is expected of modern software but you still get to keep something for having invested that money when you’re done.
As a customer, so many frustrating things boil down to not being given a choice. Not even having a tickbox to express which way you'd like it even if the default is otherwise.
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.
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.
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?
Where does your income come from again? Is it this same zero cost software we're talking about right now? The same zero cost software that an employer pays you a salary and benefits for, or...?
> 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.
Yeah, but takes nation-state amounts of money to bring new medical devices to market.
> Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.
Buy a laptop, Linux, self, Linux, Linux, Linux. There, zero cost for an individual person to write software on the laptop they already owned for other reasons.
Put another way, my kid can sit down at their computer and write a web browser without paying a single additional penny.
I don't owe it to anyone to pay them money instead of writing an equivalent version myself. I choose to pay some vendors money because they've done nice work and I'd rather slip them cash than spend the time to re-invent their particular wheel. That's the category BBEdit's in for me and why I buy their apps. But I don't have to. And yes, I give away literally 100% of my off-work software for anyone else to use who wants to. I wrote those things with free tools for free languages to run on free operating systems, so why not give back? I have a day job to put food on the table. My hobby projects are entirely in the FOSS world that you seem to have forgotten exists.
> 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.
Hey, if it only cost millions to install and maintain a leyline network with magic circles capable of transmitting matter for pennies then I would count that as teleportation, yeah.
To a point, although you can't make your own kiln for free. The tools in those trades consume a significant amount of resources, where computing is basically free once you pay for the hardware. Something like GCC is the software equivalent of a steel mill. Even if you could design one and give out the designs for free, you'd still have to pay for the raw materials to construct one.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think subscriptions for every single thing would have taken off the way it did if it hadn’t been for Apple forcing it on mobile where normal people use the most software. I do support software that isn’t subscription as much as I can. Alibre 3D is another good one, though not on Mac yet.
BBEdit is a small private company, no VCs. They probably make a ton of cash (by normal standards) 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.
Plus, BBEdit has a heritage and extremely well rounded and polished codebase. They would not betray their stable business, quality and heritage for some short term gain.
They are building a good product for the fun of it and making good money out of it, which they deserve squarely.
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.
The app store doesn’t allow for any kind of upgrade pricing, so offering a subscription allows them to operate in the app store sustainably. A shitty compromise, but i don’t blame them for making. 12 years later you can still buy without subscribing - which is what counts for me
> 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.
For hobbyists with revenue less than $1 million per year, the App Store commission is 15%.
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.
It's been great software: reliably native, promptly releases updates with macOS changes (I had a retina-capable text editor before I had a retina display for my mac), and consistently updated to fix bugs. Some of the change log entries are impressively obscure.
I finally paid for my v15 upgrade ~2 weeks ago, so I wish I could take the credit for the v16 release. But given their long standing, generous policy of giving an updated license if you bought in the last N months (Nov 1st 2025 this time!), I'm actually in great shape and the meme falls very flat.
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.
Thank you very much for this recommendation! Most of my work is in Xcode, and in an ideal world Xcode would just support third-party syntax highlighting (or LSP), and I've been looking for a Mac-assed simple editor for those scenarios where I just want basic syntax support for a random text file. CotEditor is perfect!
I wonder if anyone has taken the source of TextEdit [1] and added some minor niceties to just make it slightly more convenient for text editing (like adding line numbers).
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.
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.
You'll never hear me speak evil on Emacs. It's one of mankind's greatest software accomplishments. But I spend most of my days and nights on a Mac, and when in Rome...
I admit I have recently moved, on my Mac, from BBEdit to Emacs for most things, although Emacs has also taken over from Ulysses and Day One for me. But there are still some things that I end up doing in BBEdit, because it's kind of a multitool for text manipulation that, unlike Emacs, exposes its power very easily. As much as I'm growing to love Emacs, there's something to be said for an editor that doesn't answer so many questions with "write a little Lisp".
So, I’ve used BBEdit briefly in the past, and I’m familiar with its stellar reputation. But I’m confused by some of the comments here. Are people mainly using it in place of something like Obsidian? Vim? Emacs? VS Code? Notes? It doesn’t look like it would make for a great IDE but seems to have very powerful text transformation abilities. If I work in VS Code and use Obsidian for notes, is there still a place for something like this? What kinds of workflows are people using it for?
When I use it, it’s in place of Emacs or Zed and dealing with smallish projects in well-supported languages. The phrase I hear a lot is that it’s a “Mac-assed Mac app”, integrated into that environment far more than the others. For instance, you can’t script Emacs with Shortcuts or AppleScript.
This isn’t objectively better or worse. They have features BBEdit doesn’t. It has features they don’t. The rest largely comes down to taste.
"Added a command to the View menu: 'Gather Untitled Documents'. This will collect all untitled (never saved) documents into the active window, removing
them from other windows (and possibly closing those windows in the process)."
Honestly, this alone might be worth the upgrade price. I use BBEdit all day every day, and untitled docs tend to proliferate. I use the scratchpad a lot but still end up with lots of untitled docs.
Just gonna chime in here to mention I am one of the users who has NOT been here since Classic mac or any sort of olden days (I mean, I was born in 2001; there are people who have used BBEdit longer than I have been alive).
My first experience with BBEdit was around 2020, and I have had a copy of it ever since on a Mac for light editing. My main dev home is JetBrains IDEs, but I find VS Code too heavy for quick text edits. That, and Shell Worksheets are enough of a game changer that it justifies the whole price.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That's not true, it became available in all NSTextViews by default, although with a bit different look.
I’m not talking about Writing Tools but being able to run chat queries to do things, ala OmniFocus. I could see Yojimbo using features like “summarize all the docs in this folder” or “suggest the right tags for this”. It can’t take advantage of those built-in features.
Well, obviously, software can't do things that the author didn't write code for. But AppKit components do get updated with some new features even if the original software didn't have support for them originally.
Thanks for the examples. I simply wasn't expecting the features you originally listed to require application support, I see they're more involved that I imagined.
You bet. Even with things like iCloud, any old app can store a file in iCloud Drive just like any other folder on the computer, but apps have to use the CloudKit SDK to use more advanced sync features. It keeps getting updated annually, so apps using an older CloudKit can't use features that've been added since then.
I'm gdam sick of hearing about BBEdit updates and new features, I swear it's almost enough to make me buy another Mac just to get this amazing godlike editor back again, fk I miss it so bad... quit torturing me BareBones
The tab key in BBEdit inserts a literal tab character, or advances to a tab stop. It doesn't indent the line, which is what I would argue it should do when writing code.
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..
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.
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.
I've been using BBEdit since the System 7 days or thereabouts. Then I discovered Vim and I was hooked. And then came Neovim, which is still my daily driver.
BBEdit has been my never-fail backup editor, especially for Mac-specific tasks. It's been a little awkward because of my Vim muscle memory. Glad to see they're adding Vi/Vim keybindings, which I've wanted for a long time.
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.
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.
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