When comparing Spyder vs Bluefish, the Slant community recommends Spyder for most people. In the question“What are the best Python IDEs or editors?” Spyder is ranked 7th while Bluefish is ranked 40th. The most important reason people chose Spyder is:
Released under the MIT license.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and open-source
Released under the MIT license.
Pro Graph plotting support
Spyder can plot graphs and provide the list of all variables.
Pro Enables to write consistent code
Pylint integration enables to check the code for PEP8 style guide and detect errors.
Pro Powerful autocompletion
Spyder's autocomplete features are made possible by a library called rope which gives Spyder powerful autocompletion.
Pro Has cross platform support - Linux, Mac, and even Windows
Spyder (formerly Pydee) has support for all of the major operating platforms - Linux, Mac, and even Windows.
Pro Helps you to use documentation
Pro Intuitive interface
Pro Relatively lightweight
Pro Has support for Vim bindings via plugin support
Aside from being an open sourced, actively developed IDE, vim key-binding support is also available. If you remember Pydee - this is it, albeit with a new name.
Pro Good GitHub project
Pro Excellent variable explorer
Dynamic variable explorer with editor and visualizer
Pro Completely Python
Pro Very powerful search and replace
Bluefish supports Perl Compatible regular expressions, sub-pattern replacing, and search and replace in files on disk
Pro Light and fast
Bluefish starts really quick (even on a netbook) and loads hundreds of files within seconds.
Pro Highlighting
Bluefish highlights matching blocks for start and end markers (for both brackets and tags).
Pro Emmet support
Support Emmet or Zen Coding.
Pro Auto-completion and auto-tag-closing
Bluefish supports 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), with included language definition files for: C/C++, CSS, HTML, XHTML, HTML5, Java, JSP, JavaScript, jQuery, Lua, Octave/MATLAB, MediaWiki, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, XML, and others.
Cons
Con Not beautiful
The default theme is not beautiful. And there are not many themes.
Con The documentation is poor when it comes to debugging
Not a lot of information about debugging is available in the documentation.
Con Consumes a lot of memory
If you're working with large data, especially arrays, another IDE should be considered as spyder uses at least 200-300Mb of memory.