Today I switched editors for the first time I’m on Linux. I do not mean console editors. I’m still a proud vim user. However, as of today, I’ve purged Bluefish from my system. Belive it or not, I’m now using Gedit as my new editor of choice. It basically supports the same features Bluefish does. At the same time, the interface is much cleaner and the GUI integrates much more nicely with the Gnome desktop. Not a surprise as it is a native Gnome application, but a definitve plus anyway. You probably don’t know that I got a draft called Bluefish Settings pending for quite some time now. I guess I will purge that one, too.
And what made me switch at last, the fellow reader will ask inquiring. A post about new features in Gedit on Planet Gnome [1], I tell you. If you follow the link, you can see screenshots of a searchbar instead of a search dialog and error or notification messages in a yellow bar at the top of the window – again instead dialogs. Although I guess the Gedit developers were inspired by the popular Firefox browser, I got used to the searchbar feature way before Firefox was even called mozilla/browser. Back then I was still a Windows user and used EditPad Lite. Edit Pad used a search- and replace bar docked to the bottom of the page – like Firefox does. Gedit will do something similar with it’s search sidebar. This is a killer feature for programmers and I long hoped it would be implemented in Bluefish. Thank God, it will be supported by Gedit now! In the good ol’ days this great search and replace GUI design saved my life numerous times. After “being stuck” with Bluefish this was the only thing I really missed and that really drove me nuts in some situations.
So thank you Bluefish developers for a great editor and a great time I had with your app. Farewell. Welcome Gedit. May the power be with us!
You tend to use more and more native Gnome apps once you become addicted to reading Planet Gnome by the way…. I even think about switching from Thunderbird to Evolution. ‘Nuff said.
[1] For those of you interested in Gedit development: A follow-up has been posted in between.
Shameless plug: If this post was useful to you, please consider buying yourself something from one of my Amazon stores: US store, UK store, FR store, DE store, CA store. If you're not into Amazon, why not donate something to GNOME, Mozilla or Wikipedia? Thank you!
