Historically, some aftermarket software products have caused BBEdit to crash or behave unexpectedly. With the release of 64-bit macOS versions, most of these add-ons don’t load at all, or don’t load in BBEdit’s address space, and so are no longer a problem.
The following are known culprits:
- Obsolete Wacom tablet drivers can cause unexpected scrolling and clicking behaviors.
- Some backup utilities such as Arq and Chronosync create an APFS snapshot with its mount point in a user-visible location, but with permissions that exclude the current user. If BBEdit starts while an Arq or Chronosync operation has a snapshot mounted, this may in turn trigger a macOS bug that ends with BBEdit not being able to display text. (This is not the fault of Arq or Chronosync; it is strictly a bug in macOS.)
Thomas Tempelmann has written a great article about “How To Identify and Disable software extensions on OS X that cause other Apps to crash”.
Bare Bones’ crash reporter works, but if you need direct assistance, please open a support case instead by writing to Tech Support, describing the problem, and attaching the most recent crash log or two (the log files can be found in ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/).
(Note that using Apple’s crash reporter sends the crash logs directly to Apple, and Bare Bones won’t see them or be able to contact you.)