By default, Bluefish will automatically produce closing tags for HTML and XML documents. For example, if you type <p> within an HTML document, bluefish will produce </p>. So, as soon as you finish typing a non-empty HTML tag, meaning the tag is supposed to have a closing tag, Bluefish will help you out and close the tag automatically. This feature can be turned off by unchecking the Document → Auto Close HTML Tags (Ctrl-T) menu option.

Bluefish has two modes for tag closing, an XML mode and an HTML mode. In XML mode, Bluefish will add a closing tag to any tag that is not closed itself with />. In HTML mode, Bluefish excludes all known tags that do not need a closing tag, such as <br> and <img>.

Bluefish will choose the mode based on the file type of the document. In the filetype preferences panel, the default mode for each file type can be set. See Section 10, “Modifying file types” for more info.