The biggest part of the user interface is the editor area. Because Bluefish has a so-called "Multiple Document Interface", there are actually many editor areas in Bluefish, accessible via the tabs. By default the tabs are on the bottom.
The top of the Bluefish interface consists of a menu, a main tool bar, an HTML tool bar, and a Custom menu.
The main tool bar gives you quick access to the basic functionalities of a text editor.
The HTML tool bar provides access to the most commonly used HTML functionalities.
The custom tool bar provides access to languages and replacement functions. It is fully customizable through the preferences panel.
To the left of the editor area is the side panel. If you would prefer that the side bar be on the right side, simply change the setting in the User Interface tab found in the → menu option. The side panel consists of a file browser, a function reference browser, and a bookmark browser.
The file browser provides quick access to files and directories.
The function reference browser references CSS2, HTML, PHP, and Python functions with their syntax. Some of them provide dialogs to help you inserting them ,
The bookmark browser provides access to previously marked positions in a file.
On the bottom of the Bluefish window is the status bar. Shown here are messages, the current line & column number, the insert (INS) or overwrite (OVR) mode for the cursor, and the file type & character encoding.
The visibility of these items can be toggled via the
menu.If you want to disable any of these items by default, you can set these options in the preferences under User interface.
The
menu contains the typical About box. As usual, you will find in it developers', maintainers', and translators' details. Plus the configure flags used to compile Bluefish on your system.The other menus are described in the following sections: