BBEdit 16 Ships With OCR Search, Shortcuts Actions, and Streaming AI

Bare Bones Software has released BBEdit 16, the latest major update to the long-running Mac text editor, packing over a hundred changes alongside foundational rewrites that the company says deliver order-of-magnitude speedups in parts of the product. Headline additions include OCR-powered text search inside images across multiple files (grep-compatible), per-project and per-notebook color schemes, and a meaningfully expanded set of App Intents actions that expose BBEdit’s text transformations to system-wide Shortcuts workflows.

The AI worksheet feature now streams responses and returns results faster. Other notable refinements include W3C HTML5 syntax checking, basic vi keyboard emulation, quality-of-life improvements to the built-in Git integration, separate production and testing deployment targets for web site projects, and a substantially faster SFTP transfer engine.

Pricing follows the usual cadence: free for anyone who bought a BBEdit 15 license on or after November 1, 2025; $29.99 for earlier BBEdit 15 buyers; and $39.99 for users coming from 14.6.9 or earlier.