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Add to SafariWhen comparing Bluefish vs BBEdit, the Slant community recommends BBEdit for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” BBEdit is ranked 31st while Bluefish is ranked 43rd. The most important reason people chose BBEdit is:
BBEdit is commercial software, the paid counterpart to their free application Textwrangler. Though BBEdit comes off as pricey, this allows for stable and consistent updates from the developers. BBEdit has been around since 1992.
Specs
Question Ranking
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 Stable development, been around for decades
BBEdit is commercial software, the paid counterpart to their free application Textwrangler. Though BBEdit comes off as pricey, this allows for stable and consistent updates from the developers. BBEdit has been around since 1992.
Pro Can open very large files
Pro Just about every feature is already built in
No searching for plug-ins that may or may not work.
Pro Great customer support
The developer is very responsive to bug reports and feature suggestions.
Pro Native application
Follows platform standards.
Pro Built-in FTP/SFTP browser
BBEdit can open files directly from, and save them to, any available FTP server. It can also open and save files directly via SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol).
Pro Great JAMStack environment
You can build the static site of your dreams without needing any external assistants. Although it does not process LESS, SASS, or SCSS files, BBEdit's includes are very powerful.
Cons
Con Featureless
Con Expensive
It's US$49.99 a single user license.
