In the first chapter, we covered the basic concepts of using Bluefish. Though many of the possibilities and usages this program has, not all of them were mentioned, whereas those mentioned weren't thoroughly explained. Most importantly, you haven't learnt how to configure the program yet (apart from a few basic stuff that GTK+ itself allows you).
The purpose of this chapter is to cover all features of Bluefish in detail, so that you can take full advantage of them. We will explain how you can configure Bluefish (like window appearance, syntax highlighting, fonts, etc.), how to use external programs and view your documents, the thumbnails, and many more features.
Options->Preferences
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Press the 'Configure' button of the main toolbar. |
A window should pop up, with five tabs at the bottom and two buttons.
Save & Close
saves any changes you have made and saves them
to disk. These settings will be re-loaded in the future sessions. In case
you've changed your mind about the changes you made, press
Cancel
and the previous settings will be restored.
In this textbox, you can set the font of the text editing area. Though
you can try to write the font manually, it is preferable to click on
Font...
button. A window pops up in which you can set the font,
its style and size. At the bottom, you can preview the font you have
selected. The 'Filter' tab will help you select the font you want,
by selecting the features it should have. 'Font Information' shows
the info for the selected font. To set the font, press Ok
. If
you press Apply
, the font is set, but this dialog doesn't
disappear, so that you can re-adjust the font selected. Press
Cancel
if you've changed your mind about selecting a
different font.
This adjusts the width that Tab characters will have. This is measured in compare with empty space characters. So, if you've set it to value 4, for example, in a fixed-width font, it will look like there were 4 space characters there.
The default tab width is 4.
You will usually want to use this feature together with 'Line Wrap'. If this is checked, then the word typed will be wrapped to the next line if the text reaches the right border of the text editing area (without a line feed character placed).
If this is checked, then when the text typed reaches the right border of the text editing area, it continues to the next line (without a line feed character).
If you have this feature checked and not 'Word Wrap', then the words may be broken in two lines, whereas if 'Word Wrap' is checked the letters stay all together.
If checked, the cursor is positioned in the same column after pressing Return as it is in the upper line. If disabled, a Return will always jump to the first column of the new line.
If checked, when an action, like opening a file is done, the text is
hightlighted automaticly, thus you don't need to select
View->Highlight Syntax
yourself. If, however, you uncheck
it, then the text won't be highlighted unless you ask for it.
If checked, the syntax will be automaticly highlighted as you type the text.
Normally, when text is highlighted in the text editing area, only the
line in which the cursor is placed will be highlighted and not the whole
text. When pasting multiple lines some lines will not ne highlighted
correctly. You could use F5 (default shortcut for View->refresh
highlighting
) to refresh. If however you want to check and highlight
the whole text each time you edit the document, then check this option.
Unfortunately updating the whole widget is slow in the GTK text widget due
to a scrolling bug.
If you enable this option Bluefish will update any links when using 'move to' or 'save as' functionality. Only links found between double quotes (i.e. "link") are scanned and updated.
If you enable this option Bluefish will let you open a file several times. This is useful for having 2 different versions in the editor and checking layout-changes.
As you know, all HTML tags usually have to be ended with a </tag> comment. For example <B>Bold text</B>. However some tags can be (and usually are) used without an ending tag. Two of them are <LI> and <P>, which don't really need an ending tag. However, if you want to strictly follow the HTML syntax rules, you might want to insert them.
If the boxes are checked, then the ending tags are inserted for <LI> and <P>, else they are omitted.
By default, when a tag is inserted by Bluefish, it is in uppercase (this is a common designer's technique in order to distinguish tags from normal text). However, in case you want the tags to be in lowercase, check this box.
Note that WML needs the tags to be lowercased, so you should check this, should you want to use WML.
This enables the support for CSS (Cascading Style-Sheets). CSS can be inserted internal or as external documents.
This allows the use of deprecated HTML-Tags. Actually the W3 reccomends using CSS to format your documents, not the old Tags (e.g. <font> or <center>).
This makes Bluefish insert all tags according to the XHTML 1.0-Specification.
Inserts a XML-Line in the Head of the Document (usually a standard SGML-Line is inserted).
"Ruby-Tags" are tags introduced in XHTML 1.0 that are used esp. in japanese files to insert information thats helps in pronouncing.
When clicked, the Tags of HTML 4 instead of those in HTML 3.2 are used (where applicable).
Turns on Frame-support in Bluefish when selected.
Inserts a DOCTYPE-line in newly created documents.
Inserts the DTD-URL into the DOCTYPE-Line.
This does not have any functionality yet.
This works exactly as in the Editor tab, only that it sets the font of the tabs in the editing area (i.e. the tabs that contain the names of the files opened). It is advised that you keep it to a small simple font.
Select this if your selected font is a fontset, i.e. it has a number of different charsets and is therefor suitable for drawing international text.
By default, the tabs are in top of the text area. If, however, you find them more comfortable in another position, you can set them at the bottom, right and left of the text area.
To select another position, press the button on the right and a list of the positions will appear, from which you can select the prefered position. Note that you can also change the position with the Up and Down cursors.
These two variables set the width and height of the main window.
To adjust the width & height to your preferences, you can either write the new values or use the up/down button at the right, which will increase and decrease the value by 5. Furthermore, if you press the Up and Down cursors, the value will also be increased or decreased by 5.
The default values are 600 for width and 400 for height.
Here you can set the minimum size of the file-list in the left. Standard is 150. You can manually change the width of the filelist when working.
The number of the last opened files that will appear under File -> Open recent.
The number of the last used directories that will appear above the directory-list.
When selected the file-filter function of the file-browser is enabled by default.
When selected, backup files are created upon file-save.
This suffix is appended to the filename when creating backup-files. It is set to ´~´ by default.
If enabled you can open the same file multiple times. This can lead to unexpected results. If disabled (default) bluefish will switch to the already opened document when you open a file multiple times.
usually bluefish renames the original file, and opens the original filename as a new file. if you're working with links this doesn't work (the link then is broken). Choose this option if you're working with links.
'ask', 'save' or 'abort'. If the backup fails (you have for example bo write permissions in the directory, but you do have them on the file itself), still continue, abort the save or ask at the very moment.
If you select this option (default) you can add 'bluefish %s' as default program to filemanagers like gmc, and every file will be opened in the same bluefish window.
This refers to the View->View in Netscape
function. With
this function, you can view your document in Netscape, so as to preview how
it looks like so far.
Normally, you don't have to change this, but in case the default
setting doesn't work, you can write the command and parameters, just
like if you were calling the program from bash. The only thing you must note
is to put %s
at the place where the filename would normally be
placed (Bluefish will replace that with the filename automaticly).
The default setting is: netscape -remote OpenUrl\(%s\)
The commandline with which weblint is invoked. Weblint is a html syntax-checker.
The commandline with which ispell is invoked. ispell is a spell-checking system.
The default language for ispell to check against.
These are special switches for ispell to change its behaviour. For further information look at ispells manpage.