BBEdit, or what a cancelled compiler left behind
In 1989, Rich Siegel needed a text editor to demonstrate that an experimental Macintosh Pascal compiler worked. The standard Mac text-editing API, TextEdit, had a hard ceiling of 32 kilobytes — manageable for a memo, inadequate for a source file. He wrote a minimal replacement, called it “bare bones” to reflect its scope, and used it to prove the compiler did what it claimed.
The Pascal project was cancelled before it shipped. Three years later, on April 12, 1992, Siegel posted the editor to comp.sys.mac.announce, offered it for free, and called it BBEdit. The name had not changed.
The Mac development community had been working around the 32KB ceiling since the original 128K Mac. Apple’s TextEdit was convenient and deeply integrated, but any serious source file — a C program, a shell script, a stylesheet — could breach that limit without much effort, at which point the editor simply refused.
Siegel’s solution was to discard TextEdit and build on the PE engine from THINK Technologies, the same text-editing core that powered THINK C. The PE engine had no practical file-size limit and was considerably faster. It also made multi-file grep — searching dozens of source files at once — fast enough to feel immediate. BBEdit was the first freestanding Mac editor built on it, and it remains the only one still in active development.
Two weeks after the announcement, MacWEEK columnist Ric Ford called it “a great new editor” and highlighted its grep pattern-matching and multi-file search-and-replace — features that, in 1992, put it ahead of most editors on any platform. There was no marketing. There was no company: Bare Bones Software wasn’t incorporated until June 1994, when Siegel was twenty-seven. The product preceded the business by two years.
John Gruber, who would later create Markdown and found Daring Fireball, started using BBEdit in the autumn of 1992 and eventually worked at Bare Bones Software, writing the manual. In 2004, he built Markdown with the express intention of using it from BBEdit — which means the markup language now embedded in GitHub readmes, Jekyll sites, and Obsidian vaults was designed and tested in a tool whose entire pitch was that it would not try to be more than necessary.
What BBEdit established over the course of the 1990s was that a single Mac developer could build a professional-grade text editor that other developers would choose over products from companies ten times the size. The professional editor had lived on Unix and on DOS. BBEdit put it on a machine with a mouse and a menu bar, and held that position through System 7, through OS X, through every chip architecture Apple has changed since.
The Pascal compiler that gave BBEdit its reason to exist was cancelled. The editor written to test it is still shipping.
Sources
- BBEdit — Wikipedia — Origin as a Pascal proof-of-concept, the 32KB TextEdit limitation, the THINK PE engine, commercialization timeline.
- Company History — Bare Bones Software — Ric Ford’s MacWEEK review, the comp.sys.mac.announce announcement, incorporation date.
- 30 Years of BBEdit Not Sucking — Daring Fireball — Gruber’s use of BBEdit from 1992, his time at Bare Bones Software, and designing Markdown in BBEdit.