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   Bare Bones Drops TextWrangler for BBEdit's 'Free Forever' Demo

   Josh Centers

   Over a decade ago, Bare Bones Software replaced the free BBEdit Lite
   with TextWrangler, which at the time cost $50 (see '[1]Bare Bones
   Rustles Up TextWrangler 1.0,' 3 March 2003). With version 2.0, Bare
   Bones made TextWrangler free to raise the bar for competing text
   editors (see '[2]Macworld Expo San Francisco 2005 Superlatives,' 17
   January 2005), and since then TextWrangler has served as BBEdit's free
   counterpart. That started to change with BBEdit 11.6, which introduced
   a free indefinite 'demo' mode (see '[3]BBEdit 11.6,' 11 July 2016).

   Now Bare Bones Software [4]is officially sunsetting TextWrangler. When
   the next version of macOS ships, Bare Bones Software will keep updating
   BBEdit but will no longer update TextWrangler.

   If you use TextWrangler, this means you should switch to the latest
   version of BBEdit soon. You can use all of BBEdit's features for 30
   days, after which it drops into a demo mode that you can use
   indefinitely for free. Don't let the 'demo' wording fool you: BBEdit
   11.6's demo mode [5]has many more features than the current version of
   TextWrangler. Along with ponies, other new additional features include
   synced settings via Dropbox or iCloud Drive, live previewing of HTML
   and Markdown documents, and access to BBEdit's power from within
   Automator workflows.

   Overall, this move is a win for everyone. TextWrangler users get more
   features for free and can see more easily if upgrading to BBEdit would
   be helpful, the upgrade path becomes significantly more obvious, and
   Bare Bones doesn't have to spend additional time on a separate product.

References

   1. http://tidbits.com/article/7092
   2. http://tidbits.com/article/7956
   3. http://tidbits.com/article/16616
   4. http://us11.campaign-archive1.com/?u=d7ffaa16f302eaf61e416e389&id=5c0940cf9b
   5. http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/comparison.html#demo-comparison

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