Way back at the beginning of the web (or when it started to become mainstream) it was popular to spend hours hacking away at a keyboard to type your first web page.
These early efforts were horrific mish-mashes of colour, style (or lack thereof) and seemed to consist entirely of people telling you just how they felt about certain topics.
You only have to spend some time with the Internet Archive to see shining examples of the terror that could be wrought with a simple text editor and far too much knowledge.
From there web development got a bit smarter, and it wasn't long before GUI-based tools became available to make the whole process more speedy and user friendly.
Sadly, they didn't improve on the whole colour clashing, but they did make a lot more people a lot more productive. Even Microsoft, having previously dismissed the power of the web, did a complete U-turn and ended up releasing FrontPage to fuel even more abuse of the senses.
Here and now
Nowadays a very large number of sites use a dedicated content management system that serves to totally abstract users from the intricacies of learning HTML, DHTML, XHTML and all the other different languages that can be harnessed to produce rich and dynamic websites in favour of having strict controls on look and feel.
That's not to say that there isn't a place for good old fashioned web editors; rather that they now provide a complementary set of tools that can enhance a website, turning it into a thing of relative beauty.
So, what's the state of editors for Linux and does it get any better than Vi or Emacs? Let's take a look at what options are on offer today.
1. Bluefish
Licence: Free under GPL
Website: bluefish.openoffice.nl
Our first editor of interest is Bluefish, which is marketed as the programmers' HTML editor. When you launch it, you can understand why it's seen this way. Although you can't edit a graphical preview, you do get a whole host of icons crying out to be clicked on.
The developers have also taken a leaf out of Microsoft's book, mimicking their Ribbon interface with a range of options to format your HTML. More interesting is the slew of other components that can be placed into the mix, including PHP, SQL and some limited Apache options.
All of these are designed to take some of the pain out of creating complex pages, something which is to be commended. Even better, there's a pretty exhaustive reference not only to the intricacies of HTML, but also PHP, CSS2 and Python.
As you'd expect from any code editor, there's syntax colouring and highlighting to help you monitor and correct any mistakes in your code. Coming back to the Ribbon-like interface, we found it annoying to have to click twice to get to the options we needed – once to bring up the toolbar and again to select the option we wanted.
It's a feature we find mildly annoying in Office as well, although we can understand that others may prefer it. However, the interface does seem a little on the cluttered side, even with the ribbon hiding the majority of the icons.
After a while, you'll find yourself entering code without the icons, just to avoid having to use them. If you find that you're using a handful of icons on a regular basis, you can elect to add them to the quick bar – a Ribbon-like option that gives you your own personalised shortcut area.
Your comments (7) Click to add a new comment
a.n.other
January 14th 2009
7. Daniel Glazman is finally back on the HTML editor scene with BlueGriffon. Currently, it's only alpha-quality, but he seems to be putting a lot of time and effort into the project. Hopefully we will see a usable app before too long.
http://bluegriffon.org/post/2008/08/12/BlueGriffonorg-is-live
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cayhorstmann
January 13th 2009
6. I would like to second gumb's statement that Amaya works just fine in general. It has been around for a very long time and is under active development. I have used it for several years on Ubuntu, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is cross-platform, and its interface, while quirky, is fairly customizable and effective. Amaya shines when you edit textual documents and you need fine control over tags (for example, when it is important how bold and code tags nest), but you don't want to edit the raw tags. It also has very nice CSS support. Kompozer is much weaker in these areas.
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gumb
January 13th 2009
5. Before somebody leaps in and corrects me on the previous post, I'll do the honours myself. Just discovered that by going to the old nvu.com site, explicitly selecting the Nvu pages as opposed to the Kompozer pages, visiting the forums and then rummaging around some of the posts in the Kompozer-related topics, apparently Kompozer development has resumed and sounds fairly promising. One of the things being addressed is the source code editing that I mentioned before. Perhaps there's still some hope with that project, since the intentions also seem to be to move with the times and port it to the newer Mozilla codebase.
The developers of Kompozer and Composer seem to be going head-to-head now - will be interesting to see what becomes of the battle. Would be nice if one of the projects resulted in the code being merged back into the 'original Composer', in time for SeaMonkey 2.
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gumb
January 13th 2009
4. You must have had a problem with your version of Amaya or the Ubuntu package. I've been using it over the last two years on both my personal openSUSE machine, and on a WinXP machine at work to build up a company Intranet system from scratch. It's barely crashed once in that time and, though I agree that the interface could do with a revamp, once you learn where the functions are it's an excellent tool.
And in complete contrast to your experiences described, my own frustrations came when trying to use Quanta Plus on openSUSE (under KDE). It crashed so many times on trying to do the most simple things that it was simply unusable. Perhaps in both our cases our particular configurations caused problems, so I wouldn't dismiss Amaya so quickly.
It is slowly evolving and improving, and still receives regular updates after over ten years of development, which is more than can be said for some of the practically dead and buried other programs. Nvu / Kompozer / Composer have sadly all gone quiet for a long time now, and the original Nvu developer's (Daniel Glazman) promised commitment to the 'new Composer' never really seems to result in anything happening, after more than three years' waiting. I'm still using Kompozer for maintaining my personal websites but find it frustrating and buggy, so I'll be switching to Amaya once I've revamped the sites and made them standards compliant.
One of Kompozer's biggest downfalls is how it totally messes up source code formatting, and two add-ons (Handcoder and Tidy) must be installed as extensions, and deployed upon each document save, to correct the problem.
I began web editing with Dreamweaver on Windows years ago so I know how Linux lacks anything on quite the same polished level. I can only hope Daniel Glazman surprises everybody and pulls the rabbit out the hat, but until then I'll be sticking with Amaya.
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chuivan
January 12th 2009
3. And considering the fact that Quanta is a KDE program as a fault because it "refuses to make any attempt to integrate at all [into Gnome]", while not counting the same for Bluefish and it's non-existent integration into KDE is at least a bit peculiar.
And, by the way, KDE is not [only] a window manager...
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chuivan
January 12th 2009
2. Interesting that you claim that Bluefish has a MS Office Ribbon style interface.
The interface in Bluefish is much older than its counterpart in MS Office, and takes heavily after other HTML editors (homesite for example) which, in return, was based on Borland Delphi's interface. All of them much older than the /Ribbon/.
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