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Bluefish

programmers editor

Bluefish features

  • Lightweight - Bluefish is superfast and uses little memory (for a GUI editor).
  • Bluefish loads hundreds of files within seconds.
  • Multiple document interface, easily opens 1000+ documents (tested >10000 documents simultaneously)
  • Project support, enables you to work efficiently on multiple projects, and automatically restores settings for each project.
  • Multi-threaded support for remote files using gvfs, supporting FTP, SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, WebDAV, CIFS and more1
  • Very powerful search and replace, with support for Perl Compatible regular expressions, sub-pattern replacing, and search and replace in files on disk.
  • Open files recursively based on filename patterns and/or content patterns
  • Snippets sidebar - specify custom dialogs, search and replace patterns or insert patterns and bind them to a shortkut key combination of your liking to speed up your development process
  • Integrate external programs such as make, lint, weblint, xmllint, tidy, javac, or your own program or script to handle advanced text processing or error detection
  • Integrate external filters of your liking, pipe your document (or just the current selected text) through sort, sed, awk or any custom script
  • Unlimited undo/redo functionality
  • In-line spell checker which is programing language aware (spell check comments and strings, but not code), requires libenchant during compilation2
  • Auto-recovery of changes in modified documents after a crash, kill or shutdown
  • Character map of all unicode characters (requires libgucharmap during compilation)3
  • Site upload / download1
  • Full screen editing
  • Many tools such as tabs to spaces, join lines, lines to columns, strip whitespace, etc. etc.
  • Customizable programming language support:
    • In-line reference information (move your mouse over a function name or tag name) for various programming languages
    • Code block folding
    • Highlighting matching block start and end markers (both brackets and tags)
    • Auto-completion and auto-tag-closing for many programming languages, with reference information, and even for nested languages (e.g. css and javascript inside html code that is inside a php document)
    with included language definition files for:
    • Ada
    • ASP .NET and VBS
    • C/C++
    • CSS
    • CFML
    • Clojure
    • D
    • gettext PO
    • Google Go
    • HTML, XHTML and HTML5
    • Java and JSP
    • JavaScript and jQuery
    • Lua
    • Octave/MATLAB
    • MediaWiki
    • NSIS
    • Pascal
    • Perl
    • PHP
    • Python
    • R
    • Ruby
    • SASS
    • Shell
    • Scheme
    • SQL
    • SVG
    • Vala
    • Wordpress
    • XML
  • Multiple encodings support. Bluefish works internally with UTF8, but can save your documents in any desired encoding.
  • Bookmarks functionality
  • HTML toolbar and tearable menu's
    • Dialogs and wizards for many HTML tags, with all their attributes
    • Fully featured image insert dialog
    • Thumbnail creation and automatically linking of the thumbnail with the original image, and multi-thumbnail creation
    • User-customizable toolbar for quick access to often used functions
  • ZenCoding support1,4
  • Compliance with the Gnome and KDE user interface guidelines where possible
  • Translations into 17 languages.

1: not (yet) available, or limited available on native windows and native Mac OSX packages.
2: optional, requires libenchant.
3: optional, requires libgucharmap.
4: optional, requires python.