bluefish

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About Bluefish

Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages, and it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites. See features for an extensive overview, take a look at the screenshots, or download it right away. Bluefish is an open source development project, released under the GNU GPL licence.

Bluefish runs on most (maybe all?) POSIX compatible operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS-X, OpenBSD and Solaris. Running on Windows is possible but less supported. There is an independent Bluefish-Windows project for a native Bluefish binary for windows.

News 2009 - June 10 - Bluefish-unstable 1.3.5 released

In Bluefish 1.3.5 the very long Edit menu is reduced, and a new menu Tools is introduced. Many translations still need to be updated for this change. A very important feature was added: Bluefish will now automatically recover modified documents that were not saved due to a process kill or crash. Also a new utility was added to quickly create columns from a list of text elements. Next to the larger changes 1.3.5 has various language definition improvements, a default mime type for new documents, some small improvements for the autocompletion and various small bug fixes and improvements. Changes since 1.3.4

News 2009 - April 14 - Bluefish-unstable 1.3.4 released

Bluefish 1.3.4 has several new features such as remote file synchronisation (upload or download), text zoom (ctrl-mousewheel), toggle comment (shift-ctrl-c), split line, join line, language sensitive indenting and more. The autocompletion popup also has been refined. No more obtrusive popup, but very fast and intuitive. Tag auto closing is also done with the auto completion popup. Next to the features several important bugs have been resolved. Changes since 1.3.3

News 2009 - March 5 - Bluefish-unstable amd64 Debian/Ubuntu packages

We are now providing Debian- and Ubuntu-packages of Bluefish-unstable for the amd64 architecture too. Check the download instructions and the repository key.

News 2009 - March 1 - Bluefish-unstable 1.3.3 released

Bluefish 1.3.3 features major performance improvements and several new features. Both the start-time of bluefish and the performance while running have been improved. Bluefish is now blazing fast, even on your netbook! New features include visible spacing (show tabs, spaces, non-breaking spaces etc.) and an optional character map plugin based on libgucharmap. Note that we discovered some serious issues in glib-2.16 when working with remote files that may impact Bluefish stability. Changes since 1.3.2

News 2009 - January 27 - Bluefish-unstable 1.3.2 released

The so called release early, release often practice paid off for the Bluefish project. The new editor widget received a lot of attention and testing because of the last two releases. In this new release the new editor is mostly bug free, and many language definitions have been improved (although language definition files are far from finished). Various features regarding the new editor widget have been implemented. Many other bugs have been fixed as well, such as bugs in search and replace, in the handling of the history (recent searches, files, projects, etc.), workarounds for bugs in GVFS to work with remote files, memory leaks and more. Changes since 1.3.1

News 2009 - January 4 - Bluefish-unstable 1.3.1 released

The previous released featured a new editor widget, which was a bit unpolished. In 1.3.1 the new editor widget is much more polished, is faster, and supports more languages. Next to changes in the editor widget there are many bugs fixed and other improvements implemented. The 1.3.1 release is much more suitable for day to day use. However, it is still an unstable release so there are many unfinished features and missing translations! Changes since 1.3.0

News 2008 - December 14 - Bluefish-unstable 1.3.0 released

A new development release, and the first release in the 1.3.* branch. The 1.3 branch will lead the development to the 2.0 release of Bluefish. The 1.3 branch has the new (faster) editor widget with auto-completion, integrated reference help and much more. It does no longer require GnomeVFS since all (remote) file code has been ported to GIO/GVFS. Changes since 1.1.6

News 2008 - November 2 - migrated from CVS to Subversion

The code repositories with version control have been migrated from CVS to Subversion. The old CVS repository still exists, but the Subversion repository is now leading. The CVS module bluefish-gtk2 is now simply the directory bluefish in the SVN repository.

News 2008 - September 25 - new editor widget

The Bluefish team is working on a completely new editor widget with the features of the 1.1 series and the speed of the 1.0 series. Updates are posted regularly on the development mailinglist.

What others have said about Bluefish

Bluefish is by far the most powerful among the HTML editors we tested. It is probably the most potent editor for Linux in general. (www.suse.com)

GPL-licensed Bluefish has become an excellent 'production tool' for those of who earn our living writing for Web sites, full of little 'speed you up' features [..] It is an excellent example of how a multinational group of talented programmers can produce a piece of work under the GPL that is at least as good as any commercial program (newsforge.com)

The Bluefish HTML editor is an excellent example of of how good open source programs can be. It is feature rich, with lots of time saving tools for experienced coders and friendly enough for newbies to be productive in little or no time. (www.linuxorbit.com)

If you've ever longed for an HTML editor that is easy to use, yet doesn't try to do everything for you, Bluefish is just the editor for you. It has a wealth of features that will make your programming easier, but in the end you retain total control of the HTML. (software.linux.com)

Bluefish marries the best of GUI's and traditional text editing into a customizable, useful package. (www.linuxplanet.com)

One of the most powerful editors for Linux + Supports many programming and markup languages + Lots of time saving tools for experienced users + Friendly enough for beginners + Its wealth of features will make your programming easier + While letting you maintain control over your code (www.lindows.com)