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Software · Development

Bluefish

Code and text editor with many web and software development extras.

  • Completely free
  • Windows and Linux
  • Open source
  • No account

Overview

Bluefish is a text editor, available on Windows and Linux.

Features described in its Flathub listing: syntax highlighting.

Services and protocols mentioned: WebDAV, SFTP and FTP.

Overview written by LicitPro from the documentation published by the authors and the cited sources; we have not tried the resource ourselves.

Excerpts that establish this information
  • “Bluefish is a code and text editor with many web and software development extras” — official website, 10 November 2026
  • “Well done syntax highlighting which for example supports languages inside languages (e.g.” — Flathub, 10 November 2026
  • “Auto-completion and auto-tag-closing for many programming languages, with reference information, and even for nested languages (e.g. css and javascript inside html code that is inside a php document)” — Winget, 10 November 2026

At a glance

All of Bluefish is free: no feature is locked behind a paid plan, and its code is open.

Its licence (GPL-2.0+) is a copyleft open source licence: you may use, study, modify and redistribute it, including commercially; modified versions must keep the same licence.

Strengths

  • Open source code
  • No account needed
  • Commercial use allowed

About

Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and web developers, with many options to write code, scripts and websites. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages and has many features, but is still a very fast and lightweight application. Note that the flatpak version of Bluefish does not integrate well with other tools on your system due to flatpak security restrictions. A selection of the features: Well done syntax highlighting which for example supports languages inside languages (e.g. Javascript inside HTML inside PHP) All kind of powerful editor features like auto indenting and auto completion for many functions and libraries in many programming languages Project support Support for remote files over ftp, sftp, webdav, etc Powerful multi-file and regex capable search and replace engine Customizable integration of external programs such as pylint, make, etc Snippets plugin to automate often used code Code-aware in-line spell checking Zencoding or Emmet support Bookmarks If you are an occasional coder who is in need for a simple to learn editor, or a heavy coder who dislikes heavy IDE's like eclipse or netbeans, Bluefish is your editor of choice!

Description from Flathub — AppStream (Flathub)

Sources and checks

  • Facts collected from Flathub (credit card, publisher, licence, free status, platforms, commercial use, version) —
  • Facts collected from Official plan pages (pricing, licence, terms) (commercial use) —
  • Facts collected from Winget (Windows Package Manager) (credit card, account, publisher, licence, free status, platforms, commercial use, version) —
  • Last technical check: 6 November 2026
  • Description from Flathub — AppStream (Flathub)

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