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BlueFish: A solid editor that has been around for a long time
November 20, 2019

BlueFish: A solid editor that has been around for a long time

Jason Smith, DPA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with BlueFish

We use BlueFish as a general-purpose text and HTML editor. It is being used all over the organization where there are those who prefer a simple GUI based text editor that will work on almost every platform. BlueFish solves one huge problem for us, that being that BlueFish is easily found and simply installed, and is governed by the GNU GPL license.
  • Easily found and downloaded. If I need someone to go to the web and grab it I can tell them the URL. It is easily installed and one can be edited in minutes.
  • BlueFish is easy to use. It can have a non-technical user use it to edit config files or text documents and not have them frustrated. It has a friendly straight forward user interface.
  • BlueFish does a really good job editing HTML documents specifically. Probably one of the best HTML editors left out there.
  • Not that it matters to me, but the user interface does look a bit dated. However, if you can get over that and realize that this thing can run, on every relevant platform available, and function consistently across them all, it is no big deal.
  • BlueFish needs an easy way to open a file via SSH from within BlueFish. Some kind of "open remote file" function. Other editors have this function.
  • It would be cool if there were some Bootstrap 4.0 stuff added to the editor.
  • How can you go wrong with a GNU GPL product that works? That's a really low-risk proposition.
  • It is only returns. It is like 0% investment to 5,000% return.
  • The only negative you will have with this product are those Cretans that despise OSS and the willfully ignorant.
BBEdit is fantastic but it costs money. Frankly, BBEdit is not worth paying for. All you are doing is paying old software and I have a problem asking people to do that. Also, BBEdit is limited to the small Mac Universe. Likewise, Notepadd++ is only found on Windows but I much better than BBEdit. Finally, there is Atom. I like Atom a bunch because it has a lot more functionality than BlueFish. Atom is a better code editor than BlueFish. Also, the Atom interface is a bit confusing to the new user.
As with most GNU GPL products support is top-notch. Documentation is fantastic, all functions are documented. Also, this product has been around for more than a decade so there is lots of stuff on how to do this or that with this tool. The only thing holding you back from support is your own drive to find a solution. RTFM, my friend.

Do you think BlueFish Editor delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with BlueFish Editor's feature set?

Yes

Did BlueFish Editor live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of BlueFish Editor go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy BlueFish Editor again?

Yes

BlueFish is a good basic HTML and text editor that is easy for all to use. If I need someone to grab a friendly editor, then BlueFish is the way to go. If you need an editor to fix a bunch of pages then this editor has a lot of functions that are not found it other editors. Stuff like HTML Tidy or functions that strip extra lines out.