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 tool bars, dialogs, and predefined/user-customized menus. Syntax highlighting, advanced search/replace functionality, scalability and language function references make Bluefish a powerful tool for development.
Bluefish development started under a different name. A good and free text editor targeted towards web development was not available. Olivier Sessink started the project ProSite. Chris Mazuc also started an HTML editor. On a GTK development mailing list, Olivier Sessink and Chris Mazuc saw each others postings, and decided to team up. Olivier had a basic editor, Chris had many HTML dialogs ready. After merging the code this was for a while known as the Thtml editor.
After a while Neil Millar joined the project to add weblint integration and a color dialog. Because the project became larger and more mature, a logo was wanted. After many discussions about boring logo's, Neil Millar came up with a cute blue fish. Because this logo was appreciated by all, the name changed into the final name Bluefish.
After this initial stage, many developers, translators, testers and users joined the project.
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, fast and efficient, making it usable even on slow machines.
This list will give you an overview of the most important or outstanding features found in Bluefish.
As Bluefish is a part of a larger desktop environment, 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 user base, 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 s-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:
[1] What You See Is What You Get
[2] GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, accessible at http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/