Bluefish (software)
Developer(s) | Bluefish Dev Team |
---|---|
Stable release | 2.2.8
/ January 24, 2016 |
Repository | |
Written in | C |
Operating system | Cross-platform (POSIX) |
Type | Text editor |
License | GPL |
Website | http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/ |
Bluefish is a free software advanced text editor with a variety of tools for programming in general and the development of dynamic websites. Bluefish supports development in (among others) HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, PHP, C, C++, JavaScript, Java, Google Go, Vala, Ada, D, SQL, Perl, ColdFusion, JSP, Python, Ruby and shell.[1] Bluefish is available for many platforms, including Linux, Solaris, OS X, and Windows.[2] Bluefish can be used via integration with GNOME or run as a standalone application. Bluefish fills the niche market between the plain text editors and the full IDE: Bluefish is relatively lightweight and easy to learn, while still providing many features of an integrated development environment to support both programming and the development of websites. Bluefish has been translated into 17 languages.
Features
- Syntax highlighting
- Auto-completion
- Programming code aware in-line spell checker
- Multiple document support
- Project support
- Advanced search and replace
- Code folding
- Code navigation and bookmark support
- Auto-recovery
- Unicode character browser
- Upload/download functionality
- Multiple encoding support
- Zencoding support
- Extensible via plugins and scripts
- The SASS style language has been added (in 2.2.8 release)
History
Bluefish was started by Chris Mazuc and Olivier Sessink in 1997 to facilitate web development professionals on Linux desktop platforms. Bluefish has been developed ever since by a changing group of professional web developers under lead of Olivier Sessink. The project has had different names. The initial name Thtml editor was abandoned for being too cryptic. The following name Prosite was abandoned to avoid clashes with multiple web development companies that used this name in a commercial context in various countries. The name Bluefish was chosen after a logo (a child's drawing of a fish, in blue) was proposed on the mailing list. Since the 1.0 release the original logo was replaced with a new, more polished logo.
Source code and development
Bluefish uses GTK+ for its GUI widgets and is written in C. It does have a plugin API in C, but this has been mainly used to separate non-maintained parts (such as the infobrowser-plugin) from maintained parts. A few python plugins exist as well, but these need a C plugin to interact with the main program. Bluefish also supports very loosely coupled plugins: external scripts that read stdin and return their results via stdout can be configured by the user in the preferences panel. Bluefish uses autoconf/automake to configure and set-up the build environment, both llvm and gcc can be used to compile Bluefish. On Windows MingW is used to build the binaries.
See also
- List of HTML editors
- List of text editors
- Comparison of HTML editors
- List of PHP editors
- Winefish, a fork of bluefish for writing in LaTeX