Bluefish is a well-known and trusted editor aimed at programmers and web designers.

It provides its users with many powerful features to write websites as well as the scripts for doing so and the code for programming purposes. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages and it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites. In recent times, Bluefish and Quanta are much better tools for web page development than others. This is especially true in the present day when a JavaScript and many other components may need to be integrated into a web page to make it look like a credible piece of graphics that a commercial organisation would wish to show the world for its public image to be taken seriously. Physical and pedantic checking of code is essential for the success of a project.
Features of this application that are of interest are that it is a lightweight and lean application which loads up quickly and doesn’t burn gigabytes of memory. The small memory footprint means that it can load more than a few documents quickly – several hundred, in fact. There is support for remote file upload through the use of gnome-vfs with FTP, SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, WebDAV, Samba and other protocols available. The Gnome desktop is available for more than a few different hardware architectures, so you should be able to do something with that. A powerful search and replace feature allows for POSIX and Perl-compatible regular expressions and for sub-pattern replacement. Something of this sort is necessary on a page of code with several hundred lines. There’s also customisable syntax highlighting based on Perl-compatible regular expressions with sub-pattern support and default patterns for many popular programming languages.
Bluefish works internally with UTF8, but you can save in any desired coding. As well as the HTML toolbar, there are other useful toolbars and a completely customisable toolbar which you can configure to suit your own tastes or requirements. There are complete translations available in Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and even Tamil.
The developers claim that working with remote files is easy; in the 1.0.7 version that was used for this review and the 1.3.4 version, this functionality was available. Working with projects that are stored is easy and they can be re-opened without having to search for them. The list of other features is longer than can be described here so take a look at the features page on the Bluefish web site for a complete description. While you are there have also take a look at the development page. Here you can find mailing lists for users or developers, which allows you to ask questions or show interest in contributing to the project. Like all open source software projects, interest from new contributors is welcomed and most things are discussed openly in public on a mailing list.
So where do you get it from? Again, go to the website and download it from there. There is a new version at the time of writing – version 1.3.4 – which is said to be unstable just now, but for the purposes of this review it was proven to be stable when used on a Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope workstation. Version 1.0.7 is most likely the version that you should use. You can use ‘apt-get install bluefish’ on an Ubuntu or Debian workstation to install it. Yum and YaST can be used on Red Hat-based or OpenSuSE workstations. Slackware and Gentoo will also install Bluefish when desired. If you can’t get that to work, download and compile the source code. This is what the reviewer did to install and use Bluefish 1.3.4. Use of Alien, which is a Perl script for converting package formats, is also a useful thing for installing software. Search with Google for Linux and Alien for more information.
Bluefish is cross-platform software to the extent that it works on a GNU/Linux desktop and Mac. The GNU/Linux desktop, when used by an experienced operator, is more sophisticated than the Mac or Microsoft desktops of the present day. Many of the other open source software desktop applications out there are produced for the Microsoft desktop as well. Someone will most likely produce an MS Windows version of Bluefish eventually. However, using Cygwin you can run Bluefish on an MS Windows XP machine. Meanwhile, if you don’t have access to an MS Windows machine, you can enjoy the feeling and ease of use of GPL’d software on a top-quality and reliable desktop somewhere near to you.

Verdict
Excellent web page editor and text editor that does what it says on the tin. Feature rich. Some room for improvements that will doubtless happen soon. A good workhorse that will work without crashing in most places.
Richard Ibbotson