BlueFish is a free and open source text editor supporting a wide range of languages, multiple document interface, powerful search tools, in-line checking and auto-recovery, and other features.
N/A
Brackets
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Brackets is a free and open source text editor developed at Adobe under the MIT license, featuring inline editing, live preview, and a wide range of extensions.
It is perfectly suited for most markup and programming languages, much better than Text docs, but it is not ideal for anyone who'd like a visual editor.
When I'm designing a specific page, I can line up all the folders and files in the left File Tree panel. This keeps me organized and able to find things as I need them. Once I'm organized, I'm ready to start coding. Brackets allows you to control quite a bit of your environment, which contributes to your efficiency at coding in an effort free environment. One of the standard features of the color coding of tags really makes a difference. As I'm reviewing the code, generally I can quickly notice a missing </> or some other typo. Plus the color coding often helps you quickly find a particular line you need. And speaking of color, when you hover over a hexadecimal value in the code, a box pops up showing you the color of that code. This is particularly helpful when you have multiple colors and you want to make sure that your CSS is spot on.
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.
Editing CSS classes are done particularly well. It’s very simple and straightforward. Brackets will throw errors while editing so you know where you may have made a wrong turn. Very helpful
The simple UI is refreshing. Often times code editors throw too much on the screen. Brackets keeps it simple and it’s appreciated!
There are WYSIWYG Open alternatives, some of which work perfectly as an Open version of Dreamweaver, but the only suggestion I would have is that Bluefish add a WYSIWYG tab, e.g. code/visual.
As it is a javascript based program it can have some performance issues, especially with larger files (too large and it can't even open them).
Themes are limited to the editor area, but it would be nice to be able to customize the file-tree and gutter areas.
And the smallest quibble of all, make the open files area resizable. It's a little annoying to have to scroll up and down when you have plenty of screen space to see all the open files.
As far as usability, text editors are about as simple as you can get in the GUI world. The little features that make Brackets unique are intuitive enough that you don't really need a manual to find them and come to rely on them. If anybody knows enough about coding and markup enough to be looking for different editors, they will be up to speed before the download finishes.
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.
Brackets has a very extensive support site. Everything is organized nicely for easy navigation. If you can't find an answer you can easily file an issue with them and they will be quick to respond. What's cool is you can also message them on Slack, if you request an invite first. Slack is a very popular program right now so it's great having that integration.
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.
Atom is very similar to Brackets as it is a javascript based editor. I haven't used it as much, I tried it briefly when I was having an annoying bug in Brackets. It has a very rich ecosystem of plugins. Some of my learned behaviors and tools from Brackets were missing. I'm sure there were third-party plugins to match it, but I never got the chance to dig into it. Sublime Text is actually my other daily work horse and it compliments Brackets well. It is a compiled, native application. As such I can open the massive csv files (millions of rows) that Brackets just can't. They won't replace each other and they work well together.
Since this is an open-source tool, the ROI is very high. Anything it produces has a huge return on such a small investment of time learning to use the tool.
I was able to use this to augment the lackluster web development editor used by Eclipse. I use Brackets for the view, Eclipse for the server logic and server plugin.
The amount of convenient open-source plugins have improved productivity (minification, formatting, beautification).
