You&#x27;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.

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&#x27;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&#x27;t have to upgrade to Windows XP if you were satisfied with Windows 98. With subscriptions, it&#x27;s a recurring fee to continue accessing the software at all.

Yep. Give people two choices.1) Purchase a major version and get no updates.2) Purchase a subscription and get constant updates.

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.

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.

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&#x27;d have some pretty spiffy scalpels going around soon and many docs would stop paying for them.

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.

Customer acquisition and retention is so very hard and expensive. It’s a tough equation.

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&#x27;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&#x27;re supporting an engineer&#x27;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.

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.

I assumed that was implied pretty heavily by what I said. Either they were overcharging in 1998, or the market got bigger.

Proportionally, competition has vastly expanded too.

The pie (market) has also vastly expanded since 1998. Need to factor that, and not just inflation.

In 1998 bbedit 5.0 cost $120 usd. Adjusted for inflation that would be about $245 usd.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.

I just checked, and it looks like I have been using BBEdit for almost 35 years (It was initially shareware).Siegel still manages it (I don&#x27;t know if he is still the main coder). He never sold out.

My search for a &quot;just a text editor&quot; ended with &quot;CotEditor&quot;. It&#x27;s Mac native, not Electron, and supports both RTL and vertical text. All I could ever want.

Same. Recently moved to Windows (blah) but if I move back, that&#x27;s a purchase for me.

Proud user since the classic Mac OS days (anyone else remember the OpenDoc version?), and it&#x27;s still a solid editor at a good price.

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.

That’s the power of vim, emacs, nano, and I think Kate too. Piping the current text and&#x2F;or collecting the output of a given comment.Another nice thing is the ability to collect paths, line and column numbers from the output for navigation.

I use Zed more now, but BBEdit&#x27;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&#x27;t want to write a whole plugin, let alone in JavaScript or whatever. I just want to say &quot;process this text with this tool&quot; and have it work. BBEdit&#x27;s second to none for that.

It&#x27;s supported for Tahoe. It&#x27;s still good functional software and this is the ideal right? They&#x27;re selling finished software for a flat price without needing a subscription model to support continued development.

&gt; so this doesn&#x27;t know about the major iCloud updates, or Apple Intelligence, or UI changesI&#x27;m not familiar with macOS: Why would an application need to be updated for any of these? Were the existing APIs insufficient to integrate these?

If they add one word, “Legacy“, under the product name, I would likely be adequately warned.Barebones is great!

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&#x27;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&#x27;s broken or unusable. Still, it means it&#x27;s going to feel like a dated app and that&#x27;s not fun.[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.barebones.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;yojimbo&#x2F;archived_notes.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.barebones.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;yojimbo&#x2F;archived_notes.htm...</a>

I have used and loved Barebones stuff in the past, but strikes me as odd they&#x27;re still advertising Yojimbo on their main page. It was fantastic, but has been abandoned for quite some time.

i still use it as a quick and dirty text editor for things like my .bashrcmuch love for them sticking with it for so long

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..

I use emacs but I don&#x27;t know what you&#x27;re referring to. Can you enlighten me please

I wonder if it will ever get emacs tabs.

That is genuinely a neat usage, but I don&#x27;t find myself needing to search through images for text. I am glad they&#x27;re still updating and working on BBEdit, but the major revision feels a little flat with features.

You can search for text within images.

&gt; Support for vi keyboard emulation, for basic navigation and editing;I&#x27;m sure some people will like this update, but it&#x27;s a big meh for me. I&#x27;ll wait for some further updates to upgrade.

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&#x27;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.

BBEdit used to be my text-transformation tool.Happily paid for every update for years, even when I used Emacs, I kept BBedit in reach. For quick text edits&#x2F;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&#x2F;Perl&#x2F;Python script to make the craziest transformations.

BBEdit 16

Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart

Blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD

Flipper One – we need your help

For the past 5 years or so I&#x27;ve been working on a ground-up redesign of Freenet, my peer-to-peer project from the early 2000s (now renamed Hyphanet).The new Freenet has been up and running since December along with some early applications like River[1], our decentralized group chat and Delta - a decentralized CMS. Users have already started to build their own apps on Freenet including games, and we have some interesting apps in development like Atlas, a search&#x2F;recommendation engine.Architecturally, this new Freenet is a global, decentralized key-value store where keys are webassembly contracts which define what values (aka &quot;state&quot;) are valid for that key, how or when the values can be mutated, and how the state can be efficiently synchronized between peers.We&#x27;ve developed a unique (AFAIK) solution to the consistency problem, every contract must define a &quot;merge&quot; operation for the contract&#x27;s associated state. This operation must be commutative, meaning that you can merge multiple states in any order and you&#x27;ll get the same end result.This approach allows state updates to spread through the network like a virus[2], which typically achieves consistent global state in a few seconds or less.Like the world wide web, Freenet applications can be downloaded from the network itself and run in a web browser - similar to single-page apps on the normal web. However, rather than connecting back to an API running in a datacenter, the webapp connects locally to the Freenet peer and interacts with Freenet contracts and delegates over a local websocket connection.If you&#x27;d like to try Freenet we have convenient installers for the major desktop OSs but not yet mobile, and you can be chatting with other users on River within seconds[3]. Happy to answer any questions, you&#x27;re also welcome to read our FAQ[4], or watch a talk I gave back in March[5].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;freenet&#x2F;river" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;freenet&#x2F;river</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;news&#x2F;summary-delta-sync&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;news&#x2F;summary-delta-sync&#x2F;</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;quickstart&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;quickstart&#x2F;</a>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;faq&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freenet.org&#x2F;faq&#x2F;</a>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;3SxNBz1VTE0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;3SxNBz1VTE0</a>