Bluefish vs Micro

Bluefish is a free, open-source desktop editor for programmers and web developers. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and supports more than 30 markup and programming languages. The editor is designed for websites, scripts, and programming code, with project support for working across multiple projects while restoring each project’s settings. Bluefish can load and save remote files through FTP, SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, WebDAV, and CIFS via gvfs. Editing tools include regular-expression search and replace, snippets, unlimited undo and redo, crash recovery for modified documents, code folding, bracket and tag highlighting, autocompletion, and automatic tag closing for many languages. It can open more than 1,000 documents, with the features page reporting tests above 10,000 simultaneously. External programs and custom scripts can be integrated. The official Flatpak’s strict security blocks some system-tool and browser integrations.

Micro is a free terminal-based text editor for Windows, macOS and Linux, intended for people who prefer terminal work or regularly edit files over SSH. It is distributed as a single static binary without dependencies. The editor provides syntax highlighting for over 130 languages and includes splits, tabs, a diff gutter, simple autocompletion, persistent undo, linting notifications, macros, soft wrapping, line numbers and Unicode support. It also offers multiple cursors, mouse selection and an interactive shell inside the editor. Options and keybindings can be changed with JSON, with further configuration through Lua. Its Lua plugin system includes a manager for installing, removing and updating plugins. Micro supports language servers and remote development, and themes can use 16, 256 or truecolor; seven colorschemes are included by default. On Linux desktops, external clipboard access requires xclip or xsel for X11, or wl-clipboard for Wayland. Vim emulation and Vi keybindings are not provided.