BBEdit Lite is a free text editor for the Macintosh based on the award-winning BBEdit. Unlike a word processor, which is designed for preparing printed pages, a text editor focuses on providing means of producing and changing content. Thus, BBEdit Lite doesn't offer fancy formatting capabilities, headers and footers, graphics tools, a thesaurus, and other staples of modern feature-laden "office" software. Instead, it focuses on helping you manipulate text in ways that word processors generally can't.
Our Review: BBEdit has been a standard in text manipulation on the Macintosh for some time. This release of BBEdit Lite is the freeware version of BBEdit but offers the same high standard of functionality and manipulation. BBEdit can open and manipulate any file that contains text which makes it suitable for opening documents that aren't necessary Mac-native. Text can be converted to 7-bit ASCII and have linefeeds added/removed for use on UNIX/DOS machines. Also has sophisticated search/replace functions - I can recommend no other program of this type so highly.