Chapter III. Using Bluefish

1. Starting Bluefish
1.1. Command line options
2. The user interface
3. Working with files and folders
3.1. Creating files
3.2. Managing directories
3.3. Opening files
3.4. Saving files
3.5. Renaming files
3.6. Deleting files
3.7. Closing files
3.8. Inserting files
3.9. Editing
3.9.1. Undo and Redo
3.9.2. Cut, Copy, and Paste
3.9.3. Input methods
3.10. Basic Find and Replace
3.10.1. Searching for a word within a whole document
3.10.2. Setting limits to the search scope
3.10.3. Case sensitive search
3.10.4. Overlapping searches
3.10.5. Retrieving previous search strings
3.10.6. More on find
3.10.7. Replacing features
3.10.8. Retrieving previous replace strings
3.10.9. Changing letter case when replacing
3.10.10. Choosing strings to replace
3.10.11. More on replace
3.11. File types
3.11.1. Syntax highlighting
3.12. More on files
3.12.1. Remote files
3.12.2. Character encoding
3.12.3. Open advanced
4. Navigation and Managing documents
4.1. Navigating through a document
4.2. Navigating through many documents
4.3. Projects
4.4. Bookmarks
4.4.1. Generating several bookmarks at once
4.5. Find and Replace
4.5.1. Find Again
4.5.2. Find from Selection
4.5.3. Find and Replace Using Regular Expressions
5. More than a Text Editor
5.1. Indenting
5.2. Auto tag closing
5.3. Spell checker
5.4. Function reference
5.5. HTML
5.5.1. Special find and replace features
5.5.2. Thumbnail generation
5.6. Customizing the Quick bar
5.7. Custom menu
5.7.1. Adding a custom menu dialog
5.7.2. Adding a custom replace dialog
5.8. External programs, filters
5.8.1. Customizing browsers
5.8.2. Customizing Commands menu
5.8.3. Customizing Ouputbox menu
6. Customising Bluefish
6.1. Modifying shortcut keys
6.2. Showing hidden files and folders
6.3. Showing backup files
6.4. Editor appearance
6.5. Customizing the bookmarks path
6.6. Customizing the html tags style
6.7. Changing the author meta tag on the fly
6.8. Customizing files handling and browsing
6.8.1. Setting the encoding meta tag on save
6.8.2. Setting the default base directory
6.8.3. Merging file browser views
6.8.4. Backup files
6.8.5. Using multiple instances of a file
6.9. Customizing the user interface
6.10. Modifying file types
6.11. Modifying the files filters
6.12. Modifying the highlighting patterns

In this chapter, most of the functionalities of Bluefish are described. What you can do, how you do it, and how you can customize the default behavior.

1. Starting Bluefish

In GNOME, Bluefish can be started from the Applications/Programming menu. From a terminal, simply launch bluefish using the command bluefish.

1.1. Command line options

There are several useful command line options:

-s

skip root check

-v

display the current version

-n

open a new window

-p filename

open a project

-h

display this help screen

Many programs like browsers, email clients and file managers can be configured to open files in Bluefish. For example, bluefish '%s' will open a file in the current window, bluefish -n '%s' will open a file in a new window, and bluefish -p '%s' will open a project file.