Bluefish vs Vim

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.

Vim is a configurable text editor for creating and changing text, with uses that include programming, composing email, and editing configuration files. It supports hundreds of programming languages and file formats, with search and replace, column editing, macro recording, and a persistent, multi-level undo tree. An extensive plugin system and scripting language let users add plugin-like extensions, and Vim integrates with many tools. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows and is distributed freely under a GPL-compatible license as charityware. Users who find Vim useful are asked to consider donating to help children in Uganda through Kuwasha. Windows downloads include installers and zip packages for x64, x86, and ARM, plus links to Winget packages. For macOS, downloads link to MacVim for a graphical version and Homebrew for a terminal version. On Unix, Vim recommends obtaining it from source and links a daily-built AppImage for many Linux systems. The maker says Vim takes learning and is not a WYSIWYG word processor for typeset documents.