HTML Editor Reviews | Reviews and Discussion of (X)HTML Coding Tools

Review: Bluefish 1.0

One of the reasons I wanted to set up Linux on my computer again was to take a closer look at Bluefish, the free, GTK-based editor. I’d tried a beta version a year or so ago, more for fun than anything, and I remembered it being a fairly pleasing experience. So, I was excited to try it again, this time for the sake of proper evaluation. The result? I’m still excited. Not because It’s made me want to switch over to Linux, but because of its potential.

What I Like

• I like the overall GUI and multi-document interface of Bluefish. I’m not sure exactly why, but I prefer these default icons to those in Quanta+.
• Customizable syntax highlighting based on Perl Compatible regular expressions. I see a lot of requests on forums for the ability to highlight specific HTML tags (form, table, etc.), and Bluefish allows you to do that. You can modify highlighting for the other supported languages as well.
• Nice wizards for new files, tables, forms, and others.
• Dialogs for many HTML tags, with all their attributes.
• Bluefish can automatically generate thumbnails for images based on your settings and insert an <img> tag in the file, and an <a> tag linking the original. The thumbnails are created in the same directory as the original sources.
• Auto tag closing for HTML and XML documents.
• Custom menu (a.k.a. snippets). I wouldn’t have found this feature except that I took a little trip through the online manual. Pretty robust, and a number of handy functions already included.
• The anti-aliased fonts (when using Gnome) look great in this editor — very much like on a Mac.
• Free, free, free. I heart open source!

Gripes

• Manual is online only, and since I can’t access the internet with my Linux set-up, that’s a bit of a pain.
• I want code hinting or I’m going home and taking my ball with me.
• I don’t know if this is editor specific, but I like to highlight complete lines of text by triple-clicking on the line — this didn’t work in Bluefish.

Wishlist

• Column selection/editing
• Stackable/draggable document tabs
• Code collapse
• Auto-complete parentheses/brackets
• Code hinting/code completion
• Offline docs

Overall

The rating I’ve given Bluefish is more a reflection of its lack of features than the overall quality of the editor. For a 1.0 version, Bluefish is quite solid, and I enjoy its interface and the feel of the program; however, it’s still missing some of the things that help me get my work done efficiently. Give Bluefish a bit more time and another version number, and it’ll likely turn into a very serious contender.

(I should note that, according to the project wiki, the developers are planning to include auto-completion in 1.2, and tab sorting has been added to the CVS version of the editor. Also, a native Win32 port is planned. Stay tuned…)

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