Chapter 1. General Information

Table of Contents

About this Manual
What is Bluefish?
History of Bluefish
Main Features of Bluefish
How Stable is Bluefish?
Contact Us

About this Manual

Bluefish has a large feature set, allowing the user to customize the editing experience in numerous ways. This manual targets the novice user, providing a starting point for mastering Bluefish. However, advanced users will still find this text an excellent reference.

Chapters 1-4 are highly recommended for anyone new to Bluefish. They present general information, installation instructions, and an introduction to the main features of Bluefish.

Chapters 5 and 6 contain a nearly complete feature reference, useful for advanced users interested in customizing Bluefish. Some examples of regular expressions used for find and replace are also included here.

As a reference to the Bluefish developers, or anyone interested in contributing code, chapter 7 contains guidelines for the Bluefish source.

The manual is targeted the end user. Thus, we have tried to use a simple, well-explained approach for the large part of the manual. Some typographic conventions are denoted below.

  • Any urls are denoted like this: http://bluefish.openoffice.nl
  • Shortcuts look like this: Ctrl-S
  • Menu options are displayed like this: File However, many of Bluefish's menus are quite complex. When refering to submenus, options are separated by the right angle-bracket (>), like: File > Open .
  • When refering to user input, like issuing commands to the command prompt, a monotype font is used:
    $ foo -bar | bang -l
    Note: Do not write the $ character - it's simply identifying the command prompt. For commands requiring root access, the prompt is shown as a #.