Bluefish is a free and open-source advanced text editor “IDE” for web designer and programmers. It support variety of programming languages and service side scripting languages for creating dynamic and interactive web pages. It works on the major operating systems “Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Microsoft WIndows”.

Bluefish is a lightweight text editor comes with quite clean and simple user interface which is customizable through preference window –> User interface –> Layout. You can change the layout, fonts, and colors of bluefish to be suitable for your own usage.

Bluefish supports auto completion and auto-tag-closing for over than 25 programming languages which currently have languages definitions files for bluefish such as “C/C++, CSS, Google Go, HTML, XHTML and HTML5, Java and JSP, JavaScript and jQuery, PHP, Python, …”.

Check the full list of features and supported programming languages in the feature page.

Bluefish 2.2.3 Changes and Enhancements

Bluefish 2.2.3 has mostly many minor bugfixes and many minor enhancements. There are only few major changes: a corrupted state in the syntax scanner that could lead to a segfault was fixed, code folding had major fixes and improvements, search had major fixes, and a lorem ipsum generator was added. The GUI was restructured in some areas, and some shortcut key combinations were added. Some visibility features were added such as a bigger cursor and cursor highlighting, and some options were improved such as zoom and the custom colors. External commands had some changes such as better cursor positioning after a filter has been used, user supplied arguments for external commands, and an option to restore the default settings. On the multiplatform front: the broken shortcut key S was fixed on OSX, and file recovery was fixed on Windows. On the web front some dialogs were added for HTML5, the thumbnail generator was fixed, and insert color, path and relative path have been added. Many language files were improved, and more user configurable options have been added to most language files. You can now select a block of text by dragging the mouse in the margin, and move the selected block with <ctrl><up> and <ctrl><down>.

Install Bluefish 2.2.3 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin

First you will need to add a new repository, you can add it using the software sources or follow instructions down below.

Run Terminal, then go to this path.

I used nano text editor to edit the repository file. If would like to edit using the graphical user interface, replace “nano” with “gedit” application.

Then add the following line at the end of the text file.

Finally, update the repository list, then install the repository cryptographic key and Bluefish.

Install Bluefish 2.2.3 on Debian 6 Squeeze

It’s quite the same instructions we did on Ubuntu Precise, it just need a little modification to the repository name.

First you will need to add a new repository, you can add it using the software sources or follow instructions down below.

Run Terminal, then go to this path.

I used nano text editor to edit the repository file. If would like to edit using the graphical user interface, replace “nano” with “gedit” application.

Then add the following line at the end of the text file.

Finally, update the repository list, then install the repository cryptographic key and Bluefish.

Download Bluefish 2.2.3

Check the installation instructions Here for many other operating systems and Linux distributions.

Official website Bluefish.