Bluefish vs TeXworks

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.

TeXworks is a free desktop application for authoring TeX, LaTeX and ConTeXt documents on Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux. Its Unicode-based, TeX-aware editor is intended to be accessible to casual and non-technical users, with syntax highlighting, auto-completion, spell-checking, templates, search and replace, and support for multiple encodings. An integrated PDF viewer synchronizes source and preview through SyncTeX. In the 0.6.x series, the viewer also has continuous scrolling, two-page view, text selection and copying, and a ruler. The usual workflow uses pdfTeX or XeTeX to produce PDFs, and DVI output can be configured. Users can configure TeX commands and run BibTeX or Makeindex; scripting support includes QtScript, Lua and Python. Typesetting requires a separate TeX distribution such as TeX Live or MiKTeX. The project lists Windows installers, macOS disk images and GNU/Linux packages. TeXworks is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version at the user's option.