Bluefish

Bluefish is an open-source editor for Windows. It is aimed at programmers and web developers who write websites, scripts, and programming code. The editor supports many programming and markup languages.

Bluefish is designed to stay lightweight and start quickly, while its multiple-document interface can open hundreds of files and has been tested with more than 10,000 documents simultaneously. Project support helps users work on multiple projects and automatically restores settings for each project. Files can be opened recursively using filename or content patterns, and search and replace supports Perl Compatible regular expressions, sub-pattern replacement, and operations on files stored on disk. Unlimited undo and redo, crash recovery for modified documents, full-screen editing, and an inline programming-language-aware spell checker support regular editing work, with the spell checker requiring libenchant during compilation.

The snippets sidebar allows users to create custom dialogs, search and replace patterns, or insertion patterns and assign them to shortcut combinations. External programs and filters can be connected for text processing or error detection, including make, lint, weblint, xmllint, tidy, javac, sort, sed, awk, and custom scripts. Multithreaded GVFS support provides access to remote files through FTP, SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, WebDAV, CIFS, and other protocols. Additional tools include site upload and download, a Unicode character map requiring libgucharmap during compilation, tabs-to-spaces conversion, line joining, line-to-column conversion, and whitespace removal.

Within the Windows section of a download catalog, Bluefish fits the role of a programming and markup editor with project, file-management, and code-processing features. MirrorNest links directly to the official Bluefish release rather than mirroring the software, and identifies it as open-source.