The Macintosh Pascal project was ultimately terminated, but the demonstration program was reworked to use the THINK Technologies "PE" text editing engine used for THINK C, which was much faster and could read larger files.

BBEdit Lite lacked plugin support, scriptability, syntax coloring and other features then deemed as mainly for advanced users.

[5] Throughout its history, BBEdit has supported many Apple technologies that failed to gain traction, including OpenDoc and PowerTalk.

[7] In 1994, taking advantage of BBEdit's then-novel plugin support, third party developers started writing plug-ins to easily create and format HTML code.

In fact, the developers at Bare Bones Software first learned of the existence of HTML through users inquiring about these plug-ins.

[9][10] Table Builder was removed in version 6.0, since enhancing it would involve replicating the features of existing visual HTML editors, and BBEdit was at this time bundled with Dreamweaver.

On macOS, BBEdit takes advantage of the operating system's Unix underpinnings by integrating scripts written in Python, Perl, or other common Unix scripting languages, as well as adding features such as shell worksheets that provide a screen editor interface to command line functionality similar to MPW Worksheets and Emacs shell buffers.

[2] A number of applications and developer tools provide direct support for using BBEdit as a third-party source-code editor.

As of version 10.1, these include: ANSI C, C++, CSS, Fortran 95, HTML, Java, JavaScript, JSP, Lasso, Object Pascal, Objective-C, Objective-C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Rez, Ruby, Setext, SQL (including Transact-SQL, PL/SQL, MySQL, and PostgreSQL), Tcl, TeX, UNIX shell scripts, XML, and YAML.

[17] In 2003, Bare Bones introduced the commercial text editor TextWrangler, an enhanced version of BBEdit Lite,[16][18] which ceased further development.