BlueFish Editor

Jason Smith, DPA

Instructional Technologist in Information Technology at Pomona College (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Return on Investment

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.

Alternatives Considered

BBEdit, Atom and Notepad++

Other Software Used

Atom, BBEdit, Notepad++, Apache OpenOffice

Jerry Janes View profile

Digital Media Specialist in Marketing at Janes Consulting (U.S.) (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

Lightweight
Common GUI
Works with multiple markup and programming languages
As user-friendly as it gets
Stable

Cons

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.

Return on Investment

Like any Open solution, the ROI is relative to what you need to do to develop at the same level as a proprietary solution. BlueFish has zero learning curve and is compatible with a myriad of languages, so you can be productive as need be with no investment whatsoever. I'd call that significant ROI.