# Bluefish (software)

Bluefish is a free and open-source software advanced source code editor with a variety of tools for programming and website development. It supports editing source code such as C, JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, as well as markup languages such as HTML, YAML and XML. It is available for many platforms, including Linux, macOS, and Windows, and can be used via integration with GNOME or run as a stand-alone application. Designed as a compromise between plain text editors and full programming IDEs, Bluefish is lightweight, fast and easy to learn, while providing many IDE features. Bluefish was one of the first source code editors on the Linux desktop. It has been translated into 17 languages. The source code is available under the GNU General Public License.

## Features

Bluefish is not a complete IDE, but more than an advanced text editor. Compared to an IDE Bluefish lacks functionality like an integrated debugger. It is better described as an advanced code editor with many web specific features. Some call this a web IDE, but it does not feature a WYSIWYG web design component.
Bluefish's features include syntax highlighting and auto-completion for 47 different markup and code languages (including Mediawiki syntax), customizable via a XML language definition format. It furthermore features code folding, auto-recovery, upload/download functionality (on systems where GVfs is available), a code-aware spell-checker, a Unicode character browser, project support, code navigation and bookmarks. It has some advanced search and replace functionality with regular expression support, and multi-file search and replace support. It has a multiple document interface that can quickly load large (hundreds of files) codebases or websites, and features full screen editing.
For web development it has many a toolbar with specific dialogs and wizards to automatically insert the correct HTML tags. Furthermore, autocompletion for all tags and their attributes together with Zencoding/emmet helps for quick web development.
Bluefish is extensible via plugins and external tools and scripts. Many scripts come preconfigured, including statical code analysis, and syntax and markup checks for different markup and programming languages such as lint or weblint. Also a simple marco-like feature called "custom menu" helps to speed up repeating actions. A large set of macro's for PHP and HTML come preconfigured.

## History of Bluefish in the early years of the Linux desktop

Bluefish was started by Chris Mazuc and Olivier Sessink in 1998 to facilitate web development professionals on Linux desktop platforms. In 1998 the K Desktop Environment 1.0 was released, and in 1999 the Gnome desktop environment 1.0 was released, so this was in the early days of the Linux desktop. Bluefish was at the time one of the only web development focused editors on the Linux. Linux, due to the LAMP stack (first introduced in 1998), was becoming the most popular web hosting platform. Bluefish was quickly part of the major Linux distributions, such as Debian Potato (released in 2000), Knoppix 2.1 (at the time the most important Linux Live distribution) and the first Fedora release. On the early Linux desktop Bluefish was the most important web editor. Various books about web development on Linux therefore cover the use of Bluefish. For example Practical PHP and MySQL by Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon which even included a customized Ubuntu live CD with Bluefish as primary editor.
The development of Bluefish was initially inspired by two other editors: the configurable syntax scanning and highlighting was inspired by the NEdit, but the user interface was inspired by Homesite which was only available on windows. The work title for the application development in the very early stages was Thtml editor, but this was considered too cryptic by the small development community; for a short time Prosite was used, but this was abandoned to avoid clashes with web-development companies already using that name. Finally the name Bluefish was chosen after a logo (a child's drawing of a blue fish) was proposed on its mailing list.
The 1.0.x branch was released in 2005, and included a new logo. The 1.0 release was featured on Slashdot, causing the slashdot effect on the Bluefish website. In 2005 a Bluefish fork of 1.3 was made to create Winefish, a LaTeX editor. The 2.0.x branch was a big rewrite, changing to the GTK-2 GtkTextView widget and a new syntax scanning engine based on a deterministic finite automaton. The 2.2.x branch, which is the current stable branch, supports both GTK-2 and GTK-3.
Although Bluefish is not an official part of the Gnome desktop environment, it is often considered so because it uses the GTK toolkit and integrates well in GNOME.

## Source code and development

The open source codebase of Bluefish is available on SourceForge. After a short period in which the Bluefish developers communicated code patches over email, Bluefish joined as one of the early projects on SourceForge. The community joined in the first few months after launch, mainly promoted by Robin Miller who was a heavy Bluefish user and worked for Geeknet that owned SourceForge. Initially CVS was used for code version control, later the code was moved to SVN.
Bluefish has a well-established code-base mostly written in C and uses the cross-platform GTK library for its GUI widgets. Markup and programming language support is defined in XML files that are loaded with Libxml2. The optional plugins require libenchant, python and libgucharmap. Building a binary is done with Automake and Autoconf to configure and set up its build environment. Both llvm and GCC can be used to compile Bluefish. On Windows, MinGW is used to build the binaries. On OSX there are ports on Fink and Macports, but the official binary is built using the Gtk-OSX-Integration
Bluefish has a plugin API in C, but it has been used mainly to separate non-maintained parts (such as the infobrowser-plugin) from maintained parts. A few Python plugins exist as well, but they need a C plugin to interact with the main program. Bluefish also supports very loosely coupled plugins: external scripts that read standard input and return their results via standard output can be configured by the user in the preferences panel. Various scripts for javascript, json, CSS, and HTML formatting are included in the Bluefish distribution.