Bluefish Editor : Home

About Bluefish

Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdevelopers, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages. 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 is a multi-platform application that runs on most desktop operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS-X, Windows, OpenBSD and Solaris.

News - December 23 - Bluefish 2.2.1 released

Bluefish 2.2.1 is mostly a bug fix release, but it has one major new feature: Zencoding support (requires python). The bug fixes include a fix to build on Gtk+-2.22, many translations are better up-to-date, a fix for PCRE regular expression searching, several layout fixes for Gtk+-3.2, several obscure segfault fixes, a fix for autocompletion of variables in PHP, <img> dialog fixes, and some memory-leak fixes.

Need hosting? Sponsor Bluefish!

Need hosting for your Bluefish project? When you choose A2 Hosting via our link, you help sponsor the Bluefish project! A2 Hosting supports many of the Bluefish web languages included PHP, Perl and Ruby. MySQL support is also included along with SSH, CVS, and FTP. You'll also get access to their free CDN, free Server Rewind backups and 24/7/365 support team. Use the coupon code BLUEFISH and you'll receive a 5% discount.

News - November 25 - Bluefish 2.2.0 released

Bluefish 2.2.0 is a new major release and the start for the 2.2 series. Under the hood Bluefish 2.2.0 has a massive number of changes: Bluefish now works with gtk-3 (gtk-2 is still supported), and the syntax scanner had a major overhaul to make it faster, which is especially noticeable when working on large files.

Another big change in Bluefish 2.2.0 is the new search and replace function. It has been completely redesigned: the simple search function is now integrated in the main window, and the new function supports both search and replace in files on disk (next to already opened documents). Other new features include a toggle comment function that is context-aware (add  comments in html code, use // comments in javascript code, etc.) and a select block feature that automatically selects the current context block and can be used multiple times to select the parent blocks. Another new feature of the syntax recognition is the autocompletion of user-defined functions, and a jump function that will bring you immediately the the definition of a function.

Next to all the new features many existing features have been improved and polished. Support for new languages has been added, such as Google Go, Vala and Ada. See the introduction to Bluefish 2.2.0 movie for a good overview.

On-line PHP/MySQL course with Bluefish

Infinite skills hosts a PHP/MySQL tutorial with Bluefish. by Robert J. Tucker. The first three chapters are available for free. If you purchase the course via the this link you will sponsor the Bluefish project.

News - March 11 - Bluefish 2.0.3 release

Bluefish release 2.0.3 improves syntax highlighting performance and the performance when scrolling in large files. It adds a couple of features such as a split view feature, Clojure syntax, Wordpress syntax, Pascal syntax, jQuery syntax, Processing syntax and R syntax. Various features have improved such as tag closing, toggle comment (shift-control-c), spell check with HTML-entities, join lines and split lines, bookmarks in projects, the preferences user interface and more. On the portability front: language selection now also works on Windows, and we now provide a binary for OSX 10.5 as well as 10.6. Finally, two new translations are added: Nynorsk and Hungarian.

News - October 5 - New Windows binary fixing the "missing libcairo-2.dll" issue on Windows

New Windows binaries have been released to fix a bug in the GTK installation leading to bluefish failing to start with an error message, that libcairo-2.dll is missing.

News - September 16 - Bluefish 2.0.2 released

Bluefish 2.0.2 is a minor bugfix and minor feature enhancement release. Most notably two crashes have been resolved, and a "jump to reference" feature has been added to quickly open a referenced filename. Next to the code the translations have been improved, the Danish and Russian translations are fully up to date now.

Changes and fixed bugs since the last release 2.0.1.

News - July 6 - Bluefish 2.0.1 released

Bluefish release 2.0.1 is a minor bugfix and minor feature enhancement release. Enhancements include improved spell checking, right margin display, improved indenting functionality, and CFML (cold fusion) support. Bugfixes include fixes in a couple of HTML tag dialogs and two exotic segfault fixes. Native Windows support has improved compared to 2.0.0 and we also have a native MacOSX package now.

Changes and fixed bugs since the last release 2.0.0.

News 2010- February 19 - New Windows installer

The 2.0.0 windows installer has a bug during uninstall. If you plan to uninstall please read the information about the bug. The new 2.0.0-1 installer has fixed the issue.

News 2010 - February 15 - Bluefish 2.0.0 released!

After 16 development releases and 3 release candidates we finally have Bluefish 2.0.0 ready. The 2.0.0 release is considered the most stable and most feature rich Bluefish release. The screenshots page has an introduction movie to Bluefish 2.0.

Changes and fixed bugs since the last release candidate 3.

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)

bluefish

programmers editor