LINUXREVIEWS USER SchlagwortBluefish sollte hier stehen

The HTML editor and integrated IDE TOOL IN THE TANK The Bluefish HTML editor is useful for large-scale Web projects and also smaller programming projects.

Syntax highlighting and code blocks help developers build projects efficiently. BY ANDREAS GRYTZ

uilding complex Web projects The Bluefish window uses tabs to users the ability to put together smaller with CGI support can quickly allow users to quickly switch between projects by pointing, clicking, and filling Bbecome confusing. An HTML various documents. According to the out dialogs. editor such as Bluefish [1], with support developers, the program can handle up The editor also facilitates for project management and the more to 3500 open documents, although this localization. Users can right click on popular scripting languages, helps you is hardly likely to happen under normal the editor window to toggle through a keep track. The current version 1.01 production conditions. number of input encoding variants. The gives users a number of interesting new The sidebar fulfills three tasks: first, it program uses Unicode by default when features. has a small file browser, which gives saving files. The program is not officially part of users easy access to their files. Second, the Gnome project, but it is often used in the developers have added documenta- Developer Environment Gnome environments. Bluefish is based tion for some of the script and Web lan- Light on the GTK toolkit and requires GTK ver- guages the program supports, and users The developers do not view their project sion 2.0 or newer. libpcre version 3.0 or can display the documentation in the as an HTML only editor. The fact that later provides useful , sidebar if needed. Third, users can add Bluefish supports script languages and however, the spellchecker, which is bookmarks for directories they need to traditional programming languages such based on Aspell, is optional. access regularly to the sidebar. as means that Bluefish is more like Users can also access online resources, At the top of the editor window is a a manageable integrated developer en- such as FTP servers or WebDAV directo- multi-tab menu that gives users quick vironment. This is useful whenever a riess, transparently via Gnome VFS, a access to HTML building blocks. The full-fledged IDE might be too much trou- file system abstraction layer. Bluefish tabs are organized by function, allowing ble – such as for smaller projects – as an accesses the resources as if they were users to add tables, forms, or CSS ele- IDE often gives unwanted local directories. ments with a minimum of effort. In the features than are more likely to confuse case of more complex constructs such as than to help. Interface Design forms, the program prompts the user to The fact that users can search the inte- The Bluefish interface has three panels: specify the parameters required to dis- grated Python and PHP documentation a menu bar with standard functions at play the element correctly. in the sidebar is another useful feature. the top of the window, a main panel, Below the tabs, the software has some This is the place to go for short descrip- and a side bar below it. The main panel additional script editing tools. Depend- tions of the standard functions and their is where users edit files. ing on the language, the menu offers return values. Automatic indenting, line common building blocks for loops, numbers, and sophisticated syntax high- includes, or SQL statements. This gives lighting facilitate working with source code. Bluefish gives users the ability to evaluate makefiles and to display the calls in a separate window. It uses the same approach for calls to external programs such as Tidy, an HTML syntax checker [2]. Some external programs are pre- configured by the standard Blue- fish installation, however, the installation routine does not check if the programs really are installed and in the specified paths. This can cause confusion, as the

44 ISSUE 54 MAY 2005 WWW.- MAGAZINE.COM Bluefish REVIEWS

Figure 1: Bluefish gives you a three panel interface you can configure Figure 2: Warnings and error messages appear in the Output box, to suit your needs. which is located below the main panel. software can give you menu items for internal Bluefish name; right clicking When all is said and done, Bluefish is non-existent programs if you don’t will allow you to add folders and files to a robust editor that can give you a help- watch out. the sidebar. ing hand with your Web and program- Nevertheless, integrating external pro- The project dialog also allows users to ming work, once you get to know the grams does make the software extensi- define a Remote Directory for the local ropes. The code blocks remove the need ble. For example, users could harness project. for repetitive typing and thus prevent this ability to add their favorite devel- human error. oper tools. Impressions Besides the dependencies we already Although the developers claim that the mentioned, all of which will typically Project Management current version 1.0 is stable, the soft- be fulfilled by default on a Gnome sys- Bluefish really shines when you need to ware still has one or two idiosyncrasies. tem, the software needs a few Gnome manage multiple files from a large-scale For example, the program crashed libraries. Again, most modern distri- project. The program has a dialog for repeatedly while creating a project when butions should have these libraries. this purpose. Users can specify a target we attempted to select a template for the The program does not need much disk directory for the project and assign an project. Make sure you have a safe copy space and makes good use of memory before you start resources, and that makes it useful for working on produc- programmers working on older hard- tion data. ware. ■ According to the Bluefish website, the developers are work- ing on incorporating the Gnome Project Human Interface Guidelines wherever possible. Despite this commitment to inter- face improvements, Figure 4: Creating a Bluefish project. the program interface is cluttered in places, INFO and some dialogs, [1] Bluefish homepage: such as the sidebar http://bluefish.openoffice.nl settings dialog, take [2] HTML Tidy: http://tidy.sourceforge.net Figure 3: Bluefish lets you add external tools. some getting used to.