Bluefish is a free, open-source text editor for web developers, supporting HTML, PHP, JavaScript, Python, and more than 30 other languages.
Bluefish is a free, open-source text editor built specifically for programmers and web developers. It was started in 1998 by Chris Mazuc and Olivier Sessink to give Linux users a fast, capable tool for building websites and writing code, and it quickly became part of major Linux distributions including Debian, Knoppix, and Fedora.
The project has gone through several major rewrites over its history, moving from its original 1.0.x series through a significant GTK 2-based rewrite in the 2.0.x branch to today's 2.2.x and later releases, which support both GTK 2 and GTK 3. The current stable release, version 2.4.2, was published in mid-2026.
Bluefish is released under the GNU General Public License and is maintained as a community open-source project rather than by a commercial company, meaning there is no purchase price, subscription, or company headquarters associated with it.
Bluefish is designed to be extremely fast, starting in milliseconds and handling projects with a thousand or more open files without slowing down. It supports syntax highlighting and code assistance for more than 30 markup and programming languages, including HTML, PHP, JavaScript, Python, C, Java, YAML, and XML.
One of Bluefish's standout capabilities is direct remote file editing: it can open, edit, and save files on a live server over FTP, SFTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, and WebDAV, letting developers work against production or staging servers without a separate upload step.
Bluefish also supports regular expressions in search and replace, project management for organizing multi-file sites, Zencoding/Emmet-style markup shortcuts, and preconfigured integrations with external linting and markup validation tools.
Bluefish is completely free software with no purchase price, subscription fee, or paid tier. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License, so it can be downloaded, used, modified, and redistributed at no cost.
Because Bluefish is a volunteer-maintained open-source project rather than a commercial product, there is no premium version, enterprise license, or paid support plan offered by its developers.
The only realistic costs associated with Bluefish come from the computer or Linux distribution it runs on, since Bluefish itself is bundled directly into many Linux package repositories at no additional charge.
Yes, Bluefish is entirely free and open-source software licensed under the GNU General Public License, with no paid tiers.
Bluefish runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.
Yes, Bluefish can open, edit, and save files directly on remote servers over FTP, SFTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, and WebDAV.
Bluefish was started in 1998 by Chris Mazuc and Olivier Sessink.
Bluefish supports syntax highlighting and code assistance for more than 30 markup and programming languages, including HTML, PHP, JavaScript, Python, and Java.
Yes, Bluefish continues to receive updates, with version 2.4.2 released in mid-2026 adding icon theme detection and bug fixes.
Yes, Bluefish is one of the editors that supports regular expressions in its search-and-replace functionality.