Bluefish vs Kate
Bluefish
bluefish.sourceforge.io
Kate
kate-editor.orgSide by side
| Figure | Bluefish | Kate |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · PHP IDEs | 8.1 (#10) | 8.3 (#6) |
| Spec score · Code editors | 7.3 (#42) | 8.5 (#10) |
| Platforms | The project says Bluefish runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD; installers are listed for Linux distributions, macOS, and 64-bit Windows. | The download page provides installation options for Linux, Windows and macOS, including nightly packages. |
| Support | Community and support are volunteer-run through a mailing list and bug tracker; the project says commercial support can be requested by contacting its project manager. | Kate support is offered through its KDE Discuss section, Matrix channel and KDE bug tracker. |
Plans
In their own words
Bluefish
Bluefish is a free, open-source desktop editor for programmers and web developers writing websites, scripts and programming code. It runs on Linux, macOS and Windows and supports more than 30 markup and programming languages. The multi-document interface can open 1,000 or more documents, with more than 10,000 tested simultaneously. Editing tools include regular-expression search and replace, code folding, auto-completion and automatic tag closing. Project support restores settings for each project. Through gvfs, Bluefish works with remote files over FTP, SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, WebDAV, CIFS and other protocols. Users can connect external programs such as make, lint, weblint, xmllint, tidy and javac, or run custom programs and scripts. The Flatpak build has strict security restrictions that block integration with some system tools and the web browser, although internal functionality works. Community support is volunteer-run through a mailing list and bug tracker. Bluefish is released under the GNU GPL license.
Kate
Kate is a free text editor for viewing and editing text files on Linux, macOS and Windows. It can show multiple documents in horizontally or vertically split windows, and supports multi-cursor and column editing. For code and other structured text, Kate provides syntax highlighting for over 400 languages, bracket matching and on-the-fly spell checking. Programming tools include auto-completion with argument hints, scriptable auto-indentation and Vi input mode; the editor uses the Language Server Protocol for auto-completion in many languages. Search and replace handles regular expressions, multiline searches, open files and files on disk. Listed plugins include an embedded terminal, SQL, build, GDB and Replace in Files tools. Kate can open remote files and supports Unicode and other encodings. Backups on save and swap files can help recover data after a system crash. The editor is free, and its listed plan describes it as available for Linux, Windows and macOS. Nightly packages are compiled daily, but may be unstable or incomplete and are recommended for testing.