Bluefish is a free and open-source software advanced source code editor with a variety of tools for programming and website development.

It supports editing source code such as C, JavaScript,[2] Java, PHP,[3][4] Python,[5][6] as well as markup languages such as HTML,[7] YAML and XML.

[8][9] It is available for many platforms, including Linux,[10] macOS,[11] and Windows,[12][13] and can be used via integration with GNOME or run as a stand-alone application.

It has a multiple document interface[29] that can quickly load large (hundreds of files) codebases or websites,[20][27] and features full screen editing.

[19] For web development it has many a toolbar with specific dialogs and wizards to automatically insert the correct HTML tags.

[32] Also a simple marco-like feature called "custom menu" helps to speed up repeating actions.

[34] Bluefish was started by Chris Mazuc and Olivier Sessink in 1998 to facilitate web development professionals on Linux desktop platforms.

[47] Finally the name Bluefish was chosen after a logo (a child's drawing of a blue fish) was proposed on its mailing list.

[49] The 2.0.x branch[50] was a big rewrite, changing to the GTK-2 GtkTextView widget and a new syntax scanning engine based on a deterministic finite automaton.

The community joined in the first few months after launch, mainly promoted by Robin Miller who was a heavy Bluefish user[18] and worked for Geeknet that owned SourceForge.