Bluefish is a powerful editor for experienced web designers and
programmers based on the GTK2 GUI interface. Bluefish supports many
programming and markup languages, but focuses on editing dynamic and
interactive websites.
Bluefish is not a WYSIWYG[1] text editor. This is deliberate, allowing the
programmer to stay in full control. To alleviate the editing
process, a large number of features are at your disposal. For
inserting markup and code, there are toolbars, dialogs, and
predefined/user-customized menus. Syntax highlighting, advanced
search/replace functionality, scalability and language function
references make Bluefish a powerful tool for development.
Several years have passed since the first Bluefish release.
Since that time, the fish has gained a reputation as an
excellent editor, with qualities like stability, usability and
numerous features. Also, Bluefish is small and needs only GTK2
to function, making it usable even on slow machines.
Main Features of Bluefish
This list will give you an overview of the most important or
outstanding features found in Bluefish.
-
A What You Write Is What You Get interface
-
Multiple document interface, will easily open 500+ documents
(tested 3500 with documents simultaneously).
-
Customizable syntax highlighting based on Perl compatible
regular expressions, with subpattern support. Default
patterns are included for
- C
- cfml
- ColdFusion
- Gettext po
- HTML
- Java
- Pascal
- Perl
- PHP
- Python
- R
- XML
-
Anti-aliased text window
-
Multiple encodings support, can convert between different
character sets, supports multibyte characters, unicode, UTF8
etc.
-
Nice wizards for startup, tables, frames, and others
-
Dialogs for many HTML tags, with all their attributes
-
HTML toolbar and tearable menus
-
User-customizable toolbar for quick access to often used
functions
-
Open files based on filename patterns and/or content
-
Fully featured image insert dialog
-
Thumbnail creation and automatically linking of the
thumbnail with the original image
-
Multi thumbnail generation for easy creation of photo albums
or screenshot pages
-
Line numbers along the document
-
A custom menu, specify your own tags or sets of code, and
define your own dialogs
-
Custom search and replace pattern support for the Custom
menu
-
Very powerful search and replace, allowing POSIX and Perl
Compatible regular expressions and sub-pattern replacing
-
Excellent undo/redo functionality
-
Configurable recent documents and recent directories
functionality
-
Translations in
da fr es it hu pl no ru sv
-
User customizable integration with many programs,
including weblint, tidy, make, javac etc.
-
XML based function reference. Currently, references are
included for HTML and PHP. A GTK reference is available, and
support for Perl and Python will be added. You may also
create your own function reference. The XML format is
described later in the manual.
As Bluefish is a part of a larger desktop enviroment,
we've focused on making the GUI consistent with the Gnome HIG
[2]
. However, we prefer not following it in every detail, as
some parts are intended
for the end user
, while Bluefish is
for the programmer
.
Some features from v0.7 (GTK1) are not yet implemented. The main
missing piece is project management, which will be implemented
before v1.0. If you depend on this feature, v0.7 may still be
the version of choice.
Quite stable! The Bluefish developers aim to produce code that
neither crashes nor leaks memory. Of course, that's not always
easy to do. Leaks and crashes are often fixed in CVS as soon as
they're discovered and hunted down. In addition to Bluefish's
large userbase, the developers use Bluefish for their daily
work. So, fixing bugs and preventing crashes is always a major
priority. However, some nags still exist. One example being the
issue of slightly sluggish copy/paste functions.
For an updated list of open bugs, please visit the todo-list on
the Bluefish WiKi, at
http://bfwiki.tellefsen.net/?pagename=ToDoList
.
We appreciate any and all contributions! Please tell us if
Bluefish crashes on you :-).
We, the Bluefish development team, welcome all comments, user
requests, constructive criticisms, and contributions. Are you
curious or seeking information regarding Bluefish? Would you
like to contribute by translating Bluefish or its manual? Here
are your options:
-
http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/
- The main website where you'll find news, updates and more
information.
-
http://bfwiki.tellefsen.net/
- The Bluefish WiKi is the notebook for the developers,
containing a lot of information. This includes, but is not
limited to: updated project roadmaps, status of
translations, feature requests, and open bugs.
-
You can subscribe to the Bluefish mailinglist by sending an
email containing
“
subscribe bluefish-dev
”
to
<
bluefish-dev-request@lists.ems.ru
>
.
-
Do you want to help translate Bluefish? Please let us know
by dropping an email to Walter Echarri
<
wecharri(at)infovia.com.ar
>
, our friendly translation maintainer.
-
If you've got a general question, you can also drop an email
to
<
bluefish(at)bluefish.openoffice.nl
>.