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Mac text-editing stalwart BBEdit celebrates 20-year anniversary

Mac text-editing stalwart BBEdit celebrates 20-year anniversary

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Bare Bones Software is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its flagship product, the text editor BBEdit, an application that has been with the Mac community since the days of System 6.

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BBEdit Turns 20 Mac OS X
BBEdit Turns 20 Mac OS X

Finding the perfect text editor is no small feat, with users particularly specific about their various needs and wants — a fact that makes the 20-year anniversary of the Mac app BBEdit all the more impressive. First announced in a Usenet posting by developer Rich Siegel on April 12, 1992, the original BBEdit worked on any Mac running System 6.0 or higher, and featured enhanced performance for those individuals forward-thinking enough to be running System 7 at the time. The app has constantly evolved over the years, incorporating new features, becoming the first commercial application to run on OS X, staking a claim as the first HTML editor to feature Intel Mac support, and reaching a new milestone with the release of its latest version, BBEdit 10, in July of last year. Throughout it all Siegel has remained the captain of the ship, with his company Bare Bones Software expanding its line of products to include the popular information organizer Yojimbo, and the lightweight text editor TextWrangler, which itself started life as BBEdit Lite. BBEdit, however, has remained the company's core product over the years, holding a special place in the hearts of its passionate users. If you'd like to try BBEdit out for yourself, the $49.99 application is available in the Mac App Store, or you can download a free trial from Bare Bones Software itself.