Here’s the Deal

Bluefish vs Textadept

10 5

43 3

When comparing Bluefish vs Textadept, the Slant community recommends Textadept for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” Textadept is ranked 16th while Bluefish is ranked 43rd. The most important reason people chose Textadept is:

Both text and GUI versions behave mostly the same, just the way notepad users would expect it to. Like shift+arrows - select, Ctrl+c - copy, Ctrl+o - open a file.

Specs

No specs yet!

PlatformsWindows, macOS, Linux, BSD

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best programming text editors?

Pros

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.

Pro
Has both GUI and TUI

Both text and GUI versions behave mostly the same, just the way notepad users would expect it to.
Like shift+arrows - select, Ctrl+c - copy, Ctrl+o - open a file.

Pro
Cross-platform

It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Pro
Easily written plugins

You can write plugins pretty easily.

Here is the API doc, quite compact.

Here is a module which adds a support for ctags.

Pro
Small and portable

Has very few dependencies, and very small footprint. Can be copied to a new system in a moment, unpacked and be at your service.

Pro
Scriptable

Has a built-in lua engine.

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Cons

No cons yet!

Con
Community

Does not have an IRC channel or some kind of forum where a community of developers/plugin writers could evolve around. Has a mailing list which is said to be active but that does not feel that attractive.