Lev Lazinskiy

Useful Open Source Software: Bluefish Editor

update 6/11/2024: this is a post from a blog that I contributed to in 2011 called TechHacking, it shut down eventually but I was happy to be able to find some of my work through the internet archive.

Bluefish is a fully featured, free, and useful development environment. It is available on all flavors of Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. It is comparable to Dreamweaver. Although I personally mainly use it for web design, it has the capabilities to edit dozens of various programming languages including C/C++, CSS, CFML, HTML, Shell, SQL, XML, Java, Javascript, JSP, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. I find that it is most useful for web design.

https://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html

Check out the video below for a short introduction to Bluefish, and many of the new features found in version 2.0.

Many web designers still prefer to use the old school notepad application for all of their coding. While there is nothing wrong with this method, I find Bluefish to have many features that make the web development process much simpler. It is also a perfect tool for beginning web designers because it has many reference libraries for HTML and CSS tags which allow for a quick and dirty reference if you happen to forget what a particular tag does. In addition to the reference library it has various web design wizards that make things like creating tables and frames very simple.

Some other great features of Bluefish include:

• It’s lighting fast, compared to many other IDE’s.
• It is lightweight and does not use much of your system resources.
• It has the ability to edit a huge amount of documents at once, and multiple projects.
• Remote file support.
• In-line references for various programming languages.
• Auto completion/tag closing for various programming languages.

It is easy to get started with Bluefish and start churning out professional quality websites with the help of the official guide. Bluefish is available and works on:

• Linux
• Mac OSX
• Windows
• Other

Bluefish is a very powerful and lightweight program and can be a very useful tool to add to the arsenal of a web developer. My favorite thing about it is that although it makes some aspects of design and coding simpler, it does not hold your hand like Apple’s iWeb or Microsoft FrontPage. It gives you tools if you need them, but it also allows for full freedom if desired.