When comparing Bluefish vs Eclipse with PyDev, the Slant community recommends Eclipse with PyDev for most people. In the question“What are the best Python IDEs or editors?” Eclipse with PyDev is ranked 22nd while Bluefish is ranked 40th. The most important reason people chose Eclipse with PyDev is:
Eclipse has a large and active community, which has resulted in a wide variety of plugins.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion 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 Can be extended to have additional features through plugins
Eclipse has a large and active community, which has resulted in a wide variety of plugins.
Pro Feature rich including Django integration
Django Integration, Auto code completion, Multi language support, Integrated Python Debugging, code analysis, code templates ,smart indent, bracket matching, error markup, source control integration, code folding, UML Editing and viewing, and unit test integration.
Pro Good integration of interactive python console even in debugging mode
Pro Handles non-Python components well
If your project includes non-Python pieces (ie. Javascript, CSS, UML, etc) Eclipse tends to provide much better support for these than IDEs focused exclusively on Python.
Pro Can use different environments for different projects
It's very handy for managing multiple projects that each use their own virtualenv or conda environment, you can assign a different interpreter to each project and they will handle things like code completion correctly.
Pro Good font rendering
Because Eclipse is based on SWT, it uses the native font rendering and thus looks better than other IDEs on some Linux systems, where the Java font rendering is not optimal.
Pro One of the few that can debug Jython code
It handles both Jython and CPython.
Cons
Con Just plugin for python, not full editor
It useful only if you use python as additional(secondary) language in your project on Eclipse
Con Plugins can be unstable
Though there are plenty of plugins to choose from, they aren't always reliable. Some aren't maintained, bug fixes can be slow, and you may need to download plugins from multiple sources.