When comparing Leo Editor vs Bluefish, the Slant community recommends Leo Editor for most people. In the question“What are the best Python IDEs or editors?” Leo Editor is ranked 39th while Bluefish is ranked 40th. The most important reason people chose Leo Editor is:
With outlines functions and classes can be arranged and grouped with their logical neighbours, even nested. Whole branch hierarchies can be expanded and collapsed in a single key stroke, or moved from this spot to that, as best fits the thinking or troubleshooting of the day. Outline trees make navigation across broadly different areas an effortless exercise. See your whole project in a single view, across any number of external files and modules.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Outlines - better than folding
With outlines functions and classes can be arranged and grouped with their logical neighbours, even nested. Whole branch hierarchies can be expanded and collapsed in a single key stroke, or moved from this spot to that, as best fits the thinking or troubleshooting of the day. Outline trees make navigation across broadly different areas an effortless exercise. See your whole project in a single view, across any number of external files and modules.
Pro Internal command line
All Leo editor commands are available in a command bar, called a "mini-buffer", that feature tab-completion and command history. For example "Find all nodes containing phrase '...', clone them, and paste in a new tree" is a simple alt-x
, clone-find-flattened
(or cff
) away. As is toggle-split-direction
, expand/contract-log-pane
and execute-script
.
Pro Clones - when two or three or ... are better than one
Leo's unique concept of 'clones' means you can re-arrange sections of an external file to suit your way of thinking or tacking a specific issue without changing the organization of the source. This makes it a great tool for studying code from others, and perhaps contributing back to them without changing your or their preferred arrangement methods.
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 A different way of thinking means learning
There's no other code and text editor quite like Leo, so expect to put in some time learning. It can take some trying this and that before the "Aha!"s start to roll in. It's experiential.