BBEdit can dynamically switch between light and dark themes, offers a direct link to the company’s famously detailed change notes from right within the app’s Help menu, and added a new Apply Text Transform feature to automate simple batch text transformation tasks. There are a bunch of other features, of course. Now this feature’s right inside of BBEdit, and I expect to use it a lot. There are standalone apps and websites that do this, but I usually don’t bother with them and just keep hacking away in the Find window within BBEdit. Once you’ve perfected your pattern, you can save it to the saved patterns library or just click Use for Find to have the perfected pattern entered in the Find window. It also displays what’s captured by each group in a complex expression, and will provide a live preview of replacement patterns. You can enter in patterns and instantly see what they match in a test file or any currently open document. Most interesting is the new Pattern Playground feature, which acts like a test lab when you’re building a grep pattern. The Pattern Playground lets you debug grep statements before putting them into action. There’s a new grep cheat sheet right in the Find window, which should be helpful for people who are just getting into regular expressions-and even experienced grep users forget the right syntax for a particular pattern. Live Search has added the ability to use grep patterns. The Find window has gained the ability, previously available in the Live Search sheet, to automatically highlight all matching items in the active document window.

Grep searching apparently has gotten BBEdit creator Rich Siegel’s attention, because there’s a whole lot more of it in BBEdit 13.

This update adds a whole bunch of pattern-matching search-and-replace (or grep) features that I’m excited to put into use. I spend more time in BBEdit than any other Mac app, as it’s my writing and text munging tool of choice. Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.īare Bones Software released BBEdit 13.0 on Thursday. BBEdit 13 arrives, with new grep features and dark mode support

Textwrangler grep not match