Originally published at: BBEdit 16.1 - TidBITS
Bare Bones Software has released BBEdit 16.1 with significant new features and performance improvements. The venerable text editor introduces Language Playgrounds for creating new programming and markup Declarative Language Modules (DLMs), enabling you to describe a language, test and review validation issues, and export a language model in an installable .bbdlm format. On macOS 26 Tahoe and later with Apple Intelligence enabled, you can also optionally draft a first pass from a sample file.
The new Highlight Patterns feature can match a literal text search string or a grep pattern in any open document and highlight it using a desired, configured color (including an alternative for Dark Mode), and a W3C HTML5 syntax checker is now integrated and turned on by default. Support for a remote checker is still available.
The update also significantly improves performance when reading in large files, adds a Kotlin language module, brings a new color setting for “Instance variables” in the Text Colors settings, recognizes any text in a displayed image (which can be copied via the Copy Recognized Text command), improves the experience when using the macOS Writing Tools features, updates toolbar appearance and control layouts in the Setup window, reduces macOS mouse cursor management overhead while typing, improves typesetting performance in the text engine, and resolves an issue that caused BBEdit to stop responding for up to a few seconds after reopening documents at startup. ($59.99 new, free update, 35 MB, release notes, macOS 14+)