Bluefish is a free advanced text editor with a variety of tools for programming in general and the development of dynamic websites. Bluefish supports in HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP, C, C ++, JavaScript, Java, Go, Vala, Ada, D, SQL, Perl, ColdFusion, JSP, Python, Ruby and shell. Bluefish is available for many platforms, including Linux, Solaris, OS X, and Windows. Bluefish can be used via GNOME integration or as a standalone application. Bluefish fills the niche market between the plain text editors and the full IDE: Bluefish is relatively lightweight and easy to learn, while still providing many features of an integrated development environment to support both programming and the development of websites. Bluefish has been translated into 17 languages.
Users are able to use wizard to assist in task completion. Syntax highlighting, auto-completion, code folding as well as auto-recovery, upload / download functionality and unicode character browser are all included. Programming code aware in-line spell checker, support for Multiple document and projects are catered for. Code navigation and bookmarks are supported. Multiple encoding and zencoding are supported. The program is expandable via plugins and scripts. The SASS style has been added since 2.2.8 release.
Bluefish was started by Chris Mazuc and Olivier Sessink in 1997 to help web development professionals on Linux desktop platforms. Bluefish has been developed by Olivier Sessink. The project has had different names. The initial name Thtml editor was abandoned for being too cryptic. The following name has been abandoned to prevent clashes with multiple web development companies that used this name in a commercial context in various countries. The name Bluefish was chosen after a logo (a child’s drawing of a fish, in blue) was proposed on the mailing list. Since the 1.0 release the original logo was replaced by a new, more polished logo.
Bluefish uses GTK + for its GUI widgets and is written in C. It does not have a plugin API in C, but this has been mainly used by other non-maintained parts (such as the infobrowser-plugin) from held parts. A few python plugins exist as well, but these need a C plugin to interact with the main program. Bluefish also supports very loosely coupled plugins: external scripts that read stdin and return their results via stdout can be configured by the user in the preferences panel. Bluefish uses autoconf / automake to configure and set up the build environment, both llvm and gcc can be used to compile Bluefish. On Windows MingW is used to build the binaries.
A softpedia review found the software was powerful, feature rich and easy to use.