Bluefish aims to be portable; that is, wherever GTK is ported. A comparatively small set of external libraries are necessary for it to work. Any recent GNU/Linux distribution or other *NIX with GTK2 installed should be sufficient. In addition to the list of requirements below, you may also want to look at Section 3, “System Specific Installation Issues”. Note that these requirements fit the GTK2 version. If you only have GTK1, you want the last GTK1-version, v0.7.
The main requirements:
gtk v2.0
libpcre
Optional requirements:
gnome_vfs - for remote file support
libaspell - spell checker
grep & find - used by the → (Shift-Ctrl-O) dialog.
Compiling Bluefish requires a few additional packages. However, binary packages exist for many platforms, so it is likely you will not need to compile. Now, let us assume you want to compile, perhaps to get the latest and greatest from CVS. The requirements are as follows:
Development files (header files, etc) for the packages above. These are often distributed as separate packages. There is also a high probability you have these installed already.
gcc - Bluefish has been tested to compile on the 2.95, 3.x, and 4.0.x branches.
gmake or BSD make
autoconf - only if you are going to compile from CVS
gtk v2.4 at least - only if you are going to compile from CVS
gnome_vfs 2.6 - only if you are going to compile from CVS
libxml 2.0 - only if you are going to compile from CVS