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Bluefish
Screenshot Bluefish 2.0.0 with default toolbars & HTML
Developer	Olivier Sessink
Initial release	1999; 27 years ago (1999)
Stable release	2.2.19[1]  / 21 November 2025
Written in	C
Operating system	Cross-platform (POSIX)
Type	Text editor
License	GPL-3.0-or-later
Website	bluefish.openoffice.nl
Repository	sf.net/p/bluefish/code/

Bluefish is a free and open-source software and an advanced source code editor with a variety of tools for programming and website development. It supports editing source code such as C, JavaScript,^[2] Java, PHP,^[3][4] Python,^[5][6] and as well as markup languages such as HTML,^[7] YAML, and XML.^[8][9] It is available for many platforms, including Linux,^[10] macOS,^[11] and Windows,^[12][13] 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,^[14][15] Bluefish is lightweight, fast and easy to learn, while providing many IDE features.^[16][17] 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.

Compared to an IDE Bluefish lacks functionality like an integrated debugger^[18] or a WYSIWYG web design component.^[19][20]

Bluefish's features include syntax highlighting^[21] and auto-completion for 47 different markup and code languages (including Mediawiki syntax^[22]), customizable via an XML language definition format.^[23] It furthermore features code folding, auto-recovery,^[16] upload/download functionality (on systems where GVfs is available), a code-aware spell-checker,^[24][16] a Unicode character browser, project support,^[25] code navigation and bookmarks.^[26] It also supports regular expressions and multi-file search and replace.^[20] It has a multiple document interface^[27] that can quickly load large codebases or websites,^[28][25] and features full screen editing.^[18]

For web development it has many toolbars with specific dialogs and wizards to automatically insert the correct HTML tags^[21] in addition to autocompletion for all tags and their attributes^[20] together with Zencoding/emmet^[29][19]

Bluefish is extensible via plugins and external tools and scripts.^[25][16][30] Many scripts come preconfigured, including statical code analysis, and syntax and markup checks for different markup and programming languages such as lint or weblint.^[31] Also a simple macro-like feature called "custom menu" helps to speed up repeating actions.^[32] A large set of macro's for PHP and HTML come preconfigured.^[33]

Bluefish was started by Chris Mazuc and Olivier Sessink in 1998 to facilitate web development professionals on Linux desktop platforms.^[34] Bluefish was at the time one of the only web development focused editors on the Linux.^[35][36] Linux, due to the LAMP stack (first introduced in 1998^[37]), was becoming the most popular web hosting platform.^[38] Bluefish was quickly part of the major Linux distributions, such as Debian Potato (released in 2000),^[39] Knoppix 2.1^[40][41] and the first Fedora release.^[42]

The development of Bluefish was initially inspired by two other editors: the configurable syntax scanning and highlighting was inspired by the NEdit and the user interface was inspired by Homesite which was only available on Windows. Bluefish was originally called THTML editor, which was considered too cryptic; then ProSite, which was abandoned to avoid clashes with web-development companies already using that name.^[43] Finally the name Bluefish was chosen after a logo (a child's drawing of a blue fish) was proposed on its mailing list.^[34]

The 1.0.x branch was released in 2005, and included a new logo. In 2005 a Bluefish fork of 1.3 was made to create Winefish, a LaTeX editor.^[44] The 2.0.x branch^[45] was a big rewrite, changing to the GTK 2 GtkTextView widget and a new syntax scanning engine based on a deterministic finite automaton.^[46] The 2.2.x branch,^[47] 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.^[48]

Bluefish is hosted on SourceForge, and was one of the early projects to join.^[49] Initially CVS was used for code version control, later moving to SVN.

Bluefish is mostly written in C^[50] and uses the cross-platform GTK library for its GUI widgets.^[51] Markup and programming language support is defined in XML files that are loaded with Libxml2. The optional plugins require libenchant, python and libgucharmap.^[52] Bluefish is built with standard configuration and compilation tools such as Automake, Autoconf, LLVM and GCC. Windows binaries are built with MinGW. On OS X there are ports on Fink^[53] and Macports,^[54] but the official binary is built using the Gtk-OSX-Integration^[55]

Bluefish has a plugin API in C that has been used mainly to separate non-maintained parts (such as the infobrowser-plugin) from maintained parts. Bluefish also supports loosely coupled plugins: external scripts that read standard input and return their results via standard output can be configured in the preferences panel.^[25] Various scripts for JavaScript, JSON, CSS, and HTML formatting are included in the Bluefish distribution.

• Comparison of HTML editors
• Comparison of integrated development environments
• List of HTML editors
• List of PHP editors
• List of text editors

Books or extensive websites on web development that recommend and/or cover the use of Bluefish:

• David Spring. "Learn HTML and CSS". College in the Clouds.
• Gaurav Gupta (2013). Mastering HTML5 Forms. Packt Publishing Ltd. ISBN 978-1-78216-466-1.
• Tiffany B. Brown (2013). Jump Start HTML5 Basics. SitePoint Pty. Ltd. ISBN 978-0-9922794-9-3.
• Christoph Rauber, Frank Braun (2017). Webseiten gestalten Grundlagen HTML5 und CSS (in German). Herdt. ISBN 978-3-86249-738-6.
• Leslie F. Sikos (2011). Web Standards – Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML. Apress Berkeley, CA. ISBN 978-1-4302-4041-9.
• Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson (2008). HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions A Web Standardistas' Approach. Apress. ISBN 978-1-4302-1606-3.
• Michael Morrison (2007). Ajax Construction Kit: Building Plug-and-Play Ajax Applications. Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-235008-2.
• Steve Schafer (2005). Web Standards Programmer's Reference: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and PHP. Wrox. ISBN 978-0-7645-8820-4.
• Helmut Balzert (2003). HTML, XHTML & CSS für Einsteiger: Statische Websites systematisch erstellen (in German). Springer. ISBN 978-3-937137-00-1.
• Ruth Maran (2000). HTML: Your Visual Blueprint for Designing Effective Web Pages. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-7645-3471-3.

Books on Python that recommend and/or cover the use of Bluefish:

• H. Bhasin (2019). Python for Beginners. New Age International (P) Ltd. ISBN 978-93-86649-49-2.
• Tim Hall and J-P Stacey (2009). Python 3 for Absolute Beginners. Apress Berkeley, CA. ISBN 978-1-4302-1632-2.

Books on PHP that recommend and/or cover the use of Bluefish:

• Bacon, Jono (2007). Practical PHP and MySQL : building eight dynamic web applications. Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-223997-4.
• Easy Oracle PHP. Rampant Tech Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0-9761573-0-4.

Generic books on development on the Linux desktop that recommend and/or cover the use of Bluefish:

• William Rothwell (2017). Linux for Developers: Jumpstart Your Linux Programming Skills. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-13-465728-8.
• Benjamin Mako Hill, Matthew Helmke, Corey Burger (2009). The Official Ubuntu Book. Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-702120-8.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Graham Williams (2007). Debian GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide. Togaware. ISBN 978-0-9757109-1-3.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Bluefish.

• Bluefish: The Definitive Guide (manual)
• Bluefish (software) on SourceForge