AppleInsider Staff
Bare Bones Software recently announced it has halted development of popular — and free — OS X text and code editor TextWrangler in favor of BBEdit, the company's professional-level HTML and text editor.
According to Bare Bones, TextWrangler will no longer be updated to take advantage of future versions of Apple's macOS. The software should continue to function as intended, barring future macOS features or security protections that break compatibility with the text editor.
Bare Bone suggests current TextWrangler users upgrade to BBEdit 11.6, a version of the company's HTML editor that includes many of the same features as TextWrangler, plus a few additions. Released last July, version 11.6 can be used for free without a license, the company says.
What you may not know is that last July, we released BBEdit 11.6. You can use this version unlicensed, forever, for free. Without a license, BBEdit now includes all of the features that TextWrangler offers, plus quite a few others. That's right. You no longer have to pick between them.
With the change, Bare Bones is essentially replacing TextWrangler with BBEdit 11.6 — and likely subsequent versions — as the company's free-to-use product.
Customers can download the latest BBEdit iteration from the Bare Bones website and use the product for free for 30 days. After the trial period, users are limited to basic text and code editing functions, with advanced features and capabilities available through a single license purchase of $49.99.
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
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18 Comments
Textwrangler is my default out of habit but I've been using Visual Studio Code lately and am liking it.
Frankly TextWrangler probably has more mindshare as a product and they should have merged BBEdit into it.
Of course because TextWrangler is so good you really don't need BBedit. But I for one will continue using TextWrangler as long is it continues to work. In fact, I use a slightly older version (version 5.0.2) of TextWrangler already because in newer versions they killed off Assembly (ASM) code highlighting.
People who have been using TextWrangler because "it's good enough" may find $50 for a product that is largely wasted (feature-wise) on them is too pricey. Drop BBedit to $19 (or even $10 in a fire sale) and many more T.W. users will likely bite. But it is nice that they allow use of BBedit version 11.6.x for free. I did not know that. But it seems like you will lose features after the 1 month trial concludes, and whether you will have the same or worse feature set as compared with TextWrangler needs to be determined.
If you have to pay for then it's not free! That is a bit misleading! It's a one month trial that I see. Correct?
Back in the days when I was learning html or code, I would use Textwrangler and/or BBedit lite or whatever it was called. Good thing I don't have to do such things now.