BLUEFISH EDITOR INSTALL
BLUEFISH EDITOR UPDATE
BLUEFISH EDITOR CODE
BLUEFISH EDITOR SERIES

While Bluefish makes the HTML and JavaScript front-and-center, BlueGriffon attempts to provide a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) Web authoring environment. That last feature makes it easy to jump to a function definition or use auto-completion with your own code. There are plenty of minor changes in 2.2 as well, including a rewritten search tool that integrates into the editor interface (as opposed to requiring a modal pop-up window), the ability to search files on the hard disk, and an extension to the syntax-highlighter that recognizes the names of functions and variables that you define just like all of the pre-defined keywords. The comment command is similarly intelligent hitting Shift-Control-C will comment out the selection, automatically choosing the correct comment delimiters for the language and syntax you are using. If you are editing HTML, it will select the tag or block that encloses the cursor if you are in JavaScript, it will select the current function. If you are debugging a problematic page or script, you can hit Shift-Control-D and Bluefish will select the current function block, whatever that is in the context of your document. The new release adds several more shortcuts, such as a language- and context-aware “select” commands.

BLUEFISH EDITOR CODE

Historically, this meant things like one-click addition of tags or insertion of code blocks. While writing or editing a page, Bluefish attempts to give you one-click access to the operations you need while composing. The latest release also adds support for lightweight Zen-coding markup, an abbreviation-format to speed up page authoring.

There are other applications capable of doing syntax highlighting, of course, but Bluefish ships with support for all of the languages you need to design modern sites - HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, of course, but SQL, PHP, Ruby, and framework-specific syntax like WordPress modules, too. That engine is what allows Bluefish to parse HTML and JavaScript, providing not only the color-coded syntax highlighting, but niceties such as collapsing functional blocks of code (say, long JavaScript scripts or wordy HTML tables) so that they don’t take up space on screen. Version 2.2.x features a completely rewritten syntax-scanning engine, which is reported to be drastically faster on very large files.

BLUEFISH EDITOR UPDATE

Where Bluefish helps you is in highlighting syntax, providing one-click access to commonly-used shortcuts for the languages of the web, and in maintaining multi-file sites as “projects” that you can update collectively. You can open your page in any web browser by clicking on the globe button in the toolbar, but you still edit the source in the editor itself. However, GTK+ 2.x is still fully supported as well, so users on any platform will get the same feature updates.īluefish is fundamentally designed to edit HTML source code, and attempts to make that experience as nice as possible. 2.2.0 introduced a number of important changes, starting with support for GTK+ 3, making it fit in better with GNOME 3 and recent Ubuntu Unity desktops.

BLUEFISH EDITOR SERIES

The new release is the 2.2.x series (as of right now, a bugfix release makes 2.2.1 the latest version).

BLUEFISH EDITOR INSTALL

It is available through most distributions’ package managers, but if you have to install it from source, the dependencies are easily satisfied. Bluefish is GTK+-based and utilizes standard components from the GNOME platform, such as Pango and Cairo. But with that history comes stability, and the project has done an excellent job of keeping up to date with the ever-changing standards of web development and the evolving desktop Linux environment. Which one best suits your needs can depend heavily on the details of your content.īluefish has been actively developed since the late 1990s, which makes it an elder statesman compared to a lot of open source projects. Bluefish takes a programmer’s approach, while BlueGriffon is designed to provide as close to a WYSIWYG-design experience as is possible. Despite the similarity in names (not to mention the fact that both are designed to edit HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), the projects could hardly be less alike. Two major open source Web editors made releases in recent weeks: Bluefish and BlueGriffon.

Bluefish editor