bluefish

25 years of Bluefish

Bluefish is 25 years old! Somewhere in 1999 the initial codebase that was called THTML and ProSite was renamed to "Bluefish". There is a full timeline avalable.

But we need your help! There is nobody looking after the windows installer and several translations are out of date. Do you speak any of these languages? Please help to update the Bluefish translation:

• ar العربية
• bg Български
• el Ελληνικά
• fa فارسی
• fi Suomi
• ko 한국어
• ro Română
• sk Slovenčina
• sr српски
• sv Svenska
• ta தமிழ்
• zh_TW 中文 (Zhōngwén)

Please contact olivier(at)bluefish.openoffice.nl if you can help to translate Bluefish!

September 21 2024 - Bluefish 2.2.16 release

Bluefish 2.2.16 is mostly a maintenance release, with new features for the bookmarks function. Bookmarks can now be generated from external commands such as ctags. The 2.2.16 code has a lot of small fixes and improvements for Mac OSX. The old built-in javascript beautifier has been removed, Bluefish now uses the jsbeautify from your system (if available). The word-wrap function has been fixed.

March 17 2024 - Bluefish 2.2.15 release

Bluefish 2.2.15 is a minor maintenance release. It has one new feature: it can highlight the indenting level with a vertical line, which is very useful during python programming and helps with a lot more programming languages. The 2.2.15 release fixes zencoding for python releases newer than 3.12. It adds a retry button when opening files from a remote location. It has a tiny performance improvement when scrolling. It fixes a bug in the bookmarks function and the visible indenting function that potentially could lead to a crash. The perl syntax detection has been greatly improved, and YAML syntax detection has been added. The code has several fixes to make it compile on modern Mac OSX releases and to make it compile with the clang compiler.

June 3 2023 - Bluefish 2.2.14 release

Bluefish 2.2.14 fixes three bugs that in certain situations could lead to a segfault. One bug when deleting backup files on close. The second bug when closing some of the dialogs in a flatpak distributed version of bluefish. The third bug when the CSS language file was loaded on a 32bit system. It furthermore fixes zencoding functionality with python3. It also adds an option to store the scope of the search dialog to the session or project (this was removed in 2.2.12 because of a bug-report). It furthermore improves the speed of the bookmarks code. The build infrastructure was also slightly modernised, intltool is no longer used. Bluefish now also has an official Flatpak package, available via Flathub.

Feb 23 2023 - Bluefish 2.2.13 release

Bluefish 2.2.13 is a very minor maintenance release, except for the CSS syntax support which is greatly improved. Next to that it improves a few user interface parts, and fixes some very minor bugs. It also has some minor improvements for the syntax highlighting in a few other languages, most notably python.

Bluefish is a powerful open source code editor

A nice article on hostingadvice.com about Bluefish being a powerful open source code editor.

January 24 - Bluefish 2.2.11 release

Bluefish 2.2.11 is a minor maintenance release and minor feature release. The only exception to that is the python 3 compatibility which is a major change. If you compile Bluefish with python 3, you might experience new bugs. There are various minor changes as well. Double click selection has been improved (for example selecting a function name that has underscores), and is now configurable per language. Bluefish now has a feature to fill a line with spaces up to a mouse click, so you can start typing in any position on the screen (with a fixed width font). A crash when running very large replace actions on disk on many files has been fixed. Search and replace now ignores backup files by default. Cursor highlighting and line highlighting have been fixed for a rare bug. A small new feature has been added, to insert output from an external command in the current cursor position. Many language files have seen updates, most notably CSS, Python and HTML. A data loss bug - when an unknown encoding was selected - was fixed, the fallback is now to save as UTF-8. A bug when saving with unknown characters in the filename has also been fixed. Printing has been improved such as printing in landscape. Some small tweaks to the UI have been implemented. For example you can now search in files in the filebrowser (right click a directory). Search results can now be shown in the output pane. The current identifier can be selected using <shift><control><i>. Last there various fixes when Bluefish is run on top of Wayland.

News - October 17 - New package for OSX High Sierra released

The introduction of OSX High Sierra caused some incompatibilities. A new package is ready, based on the current development code base. It is available from https://www.bennewitz.com/bluefish/stable/binaries/macosx/Bluefish-2.2.10-2.dmg.

News - January 27 - Bluefish 2.2.10 released

Bluefish 2.2.10 is a maintenance release. Various language files have been improved, most notably languages that include CSS. There are also various fixes for newer gtk versions and for gtk on wayland (which is now the default on Fedora Linux). A new feature in the 2.2.10 release is the possibility to import/export syntax color styles, included are styles for a light and a dark theme. Last there have been fixes for a few rare crashes.

News - June 16 - Bluefish 2.2.9 released

Bluefish 2.2.9 is a maintenance release that most importantly fixes incompatibility with Gtk 3.20. Next to that some small dialogs have been improved, and some user interface parts have been polished.

News - January 24 - Bluefish 2.2.8 released

Bluefish 2.2.8 is a bugfix release with some small improvements and more polishing on existing features. It fixes a few serious but rarely occurring bugs. Options defined in the language definition files are now translated. Various default settings have been improved, most notably the command to launch Firefox for preview. The looks on newer gtk versions have been restored. CSS can now be compressed and decompressed. The installers for Windows and OSX have improvements, and there have been some OSX and Windows specific fixes. Character encoding detection has been improved. Auto-completion for HTML attributes has been improved. The SASS style language has been added.

News - Februari 1 - Bluefish 2.2.7 released

Bluefish 2.2.7 is mostly a bug fix release. It fixes rare crashes in the autocompletion, the filebrowser, the htmlbar plugin preferences, in file-load-cancel, and fixes a rare case of broken syntax highlighting after multiple search/replace actions. It furthermore displays better error/warning output when parsing language files. It also finally fixes javascript regex syntax highlighting. The loading of files with corrupt encoding or non-printable characters (such as binary files) has been improved, and project loading over sftp has been improved. Various HTML5 tags have been added, and HTML5 is the default now for php, cfml and other languages that can include html syntax. Saving and loading of UTF-16 encoded files was broken and has been fixed. Various languages have better syntax support, such as javascript, css, html, pascal/deplhi, and html has improved autocompletion. On OSX the charmap plugin is finally included, the keys for tab switching no longer confict with some keyboard layouts, and behavior at shutdown was improved. The upload/download feature has a new option to ignore backup files. The home/end keys now work better on wrapped tekst. And finally the search and replace dialog correctly shows the number of results when searching in files on disk.

News - April 21 - Bluefish 2.2.6 released

Bluefish 2.2.6 is mostly a bug fix release. This release fixes a critical bug (segfault) in filebrowser that could be triggered if the root directory was set as basedir. It also has a fix for a specific CSS-in-HTML-tag highlighting issue that broke HTML highlighting. The filter code furthermore caused a segfault if the command did not exist. The Windows version finally supports open in running process. Next to these bugs many small issues have been resolved. Development checks are now only enabled if Bluefish is compiled from svn, not if compiled from tarball. Various language files have small improvements, most notably C, Javascript and CSS. Several translations have been updated. A corner case for a new document from a template that does not exist was fixed. The "open" submenu now opens SVG files from the filebrowser instead of inserting an image tag. The included cssmin and jsbeatify have been updated. A syntax scanning issue when replacing large chunks of text was fixed, he "Report bug" link was broken, a new "conditional" option to the language file that makes re-using certain blocks of language files easier was added, and error reporting in outputbox was improved. On OSX filebrowser icons and the "open file" dialog size have been improved.

News - February 10 - Bluefish 2.2.5 released

Bluefish 2.2.5 is a minor bug fix release but has also quite some new features. The syntax scanning engine is faster after small changes to the text. The filebrowser is also much faster with less memory usage, with various fixes and new features. Projects now store the active document and active line numbers. Indenting is improved in auto-completion and the smart indenting. Bookmarks and paste special also have been improved. On OSX there are many improvements, such as Mavericks support, Retina display support, working system hotkeys, native input methods (Japanese, Chinese, etc.), opening files from the finder and Widget bindings on MacOSX are moved to Cmd+C|V|X|A and working. Furthermore almost all syntax highlighting has been improved, most notable jquery in javascript, HTML5, and HTML5 in PHP files. There are also many bug fixes, such as in wrap text on right margin, in the replace engine, the jsmin licence, the split lines feature, the auto-recovery and many obscure bugs. Last bluefish now has an appdata file.

What others have said about Bluefish

Bluefish, a robust code editor built for programmers and web developers, has been helping users boost efficiencies since 1997. The open-source software supports multiple languages, allowing users to speed development — even when working with large codebases. Over the years, contributors have polished Bluefish to near perfection and now focus on making small improvements based on user feedback.(https://www.hostingadvice.com/)

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)