BBEdit is the Swiss Army Knife of text editors. Whether you’re editing source code, writing an article or novel, or building a website, if your workflows require whipping text into shape BBEdit will make your life easier—and it’s been doing so for over 30 years.

It starts with unparalleled search-and-replace capabilities. The app can look through an entire folder or volume of files at once, and it supports regular expressions as well as programming and web-development patterns—so you can convert, say, a series of spaces to a tab, or change all HTML tags to lowercase. You can save custom search terms and patterns and reuse them any time, and the Text Merge feature lets you apply a list of Grep search patterns to any document to batch replace matches. You can even search for text across a folder of images—incredibly useful when you’re trying to find a screenshot of a settings window you took months ago.

Coders will appreciate BBEdit’s full-text completion for a range of programming languages and ability to handle gigantic documents that would bring lesser apps to their knees. Support for the Language Server Protocol (LSP) means the app can integrate with language servers to get enhanced text completion, error highlighting, document formatting, and much more.And built-in FTP, SFTP, and FTPS support lets you open and edit files remotely.

Want some AI coding advice? AI Chat Worksheets let you have conversational exchanges with ChatGPT, Ollama, Claude, or your own model: Just type a question and press Enter. (Because the worksheet is also a BBEdit document, you can save your chat history for reference.)

But BBEdit has something for everyone. Bloggers will cheer the app’s Markdown support, data scientists its Anaconda integration, and web developers its comprehensive HTML tools (including context-sensitive tag and attribute editing, as well as drag-and-drop HTML snippets). Everyone benefits from syntax highlighting, code folding to hide sections of a document you’re not actively working on, and support for Apple Intelligence Writing Tools to proofread, reword, and summarize copy.

The app also helps you stay organized and productive. A dedicated notes system lets you jot down ideas and important info (and, naturally, quickly find that content later). Workspaces let you save—and easily switch among—sets of documents and window layouts, making it easy to jump between projects or contexts. And deep support for Shortcuts and scripting lets you automate complex actions and use BBEdit’s text-munging features from within other apps.

Despite its power and flexibility, BBEdit is accessible enough for anyone to get the hang of—and the developer provides one of the most comprehensive user manuals you’ll find.