Bluefish vs Textadept

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.

Textadept is a free, open-source text editor for programmers, available with graphical and terminal interfaces. It supports more than 100 programming languages and includes multiple carets and selections, unlimited split views, configurable key bindings, nested snippets, column editing, and macro recording. Lua scripting can extend and customize nearly every aspect of the editor. Shell commands can be used to run code, build projects, and execute tests; optional modules add language debuggers, file comparison, source formatting, an LSP client, scratch buffers, and spell checking. The project says Textadept does not connect to the internet. Pre-built binaries are self-contained and require no installation, and source code is available under the MIT License. Requirements vary: Linux GUI use needs Qt 5 or GTK 3, while the terminal version needs ncurses. Pre-built macOS binaries are for Apple Silicon only. The project provides a manual, Lua API documentation, issue tracker, discussions, wiki, and FAQ.