When comparing Textastic vs Bluefish, the Slant community recommends Bluefish for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Bluefish is ranked 43rd while Textastic is ranked 45th. The most important reason people chose Bluefish is:
Bluefish supports Perl Compatible regular expressions, sub-pattern replacing, and search and replace in files on disk
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro iOS version available
Pro Supports 80 source code and markup languages
Textastic has support for several script and markup languages.
Pro Very fast
There's no need for hundreds of modules to be loaded on every start of Textastic. It's perfect for the fast editing of files.
Pro Supports online sync
Textastic can sync with iCloud documents.
Pro Code completion
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 Mac only
Textastic is for Mac only.
Con Proprietary
Textastic is a proprietary software and needs a license which costs $7.99.