I’ve been using Linux for about two years now and I love to see Linux progress, but one thing I’ve had a difficult time trying to do is HTML editing. Linux has a number of html editors (Bluefish, Quanta Plus, Komodo Edit, Screem) but I left them all behind because I found with each the process became too laborious for creating quick web pages. But I did find one that I do like. A quick synopsis of why below.
Bluefish is the most common Linux HTML editor (though I would label it a html-css-php editor). Bluefish has a nice feature that lets you add common tags to a toolbar, unfortunately the space of the toolbar runs out quickly and you’ll find yourself digging alot for tags. Bluefishes oversight (as of last testing a year ago) is that it doesn’t wrap tags around text. Highlighting a sentence and then clicking the tag will output the tag at the beginning of the text (both open and close).
Komodo Edit is a growing code editor in Linux that many people are beginning to migrate to. I hear it is a good editor for many different projects, however, HTML isn’t one of them. With the HTML plugin you’ll get a few tags HTML tags but HTML support is very very limited.
Of all the mentioned html editors, Screem by far is the best because it concentrates on HTML and XML use and does them well. After taking a bit to set up Screem, Screem became a nice tool to work with.
Unfortunately Screem is not being developed anymore and you’ll still find yourself digging for tags. Also Screem tends to crash every now and then. Here’s the config for screem to save you time (includes auto-save option):
Why none of the above editors make more tags available in the toolbar and feel that all tags should be nested in one menu?… I don’t know. But I found two applications that were designed better for basic HTML editing. They both do a good job of making tags and features more available: Amaya and Arachnophilia.
Amaya, Nice but Not Quite There
HTMLs’ lost editor from the web consortium itself, Amaya looks to be a great upcoming editor in it’s own right. Ergonomically Amaya has done a really good job of making popular tags accessible:
One of the better designed interfaces I’ve seen for a web editor. Amaya makes most tags available on the right toolbar with immediately below them options for those tags. Creating pages in Amaya is easy, quick and straightforward. I wrote a couple pages in Amaya and enjoyed it thoroughly. However this was when I discovered Amaya’s key flaw: Amaya inserts hard returns for carriage returns at the end of each visual line. Meaning that hard returns are Automatically entered depending on the width of the Amaya window. In proper HTML this isn’t a problem and pages appear correctly, but if you also use your HTML editor for blog posts like I sometime do, you end up with paragraphs that look like this:
This is just random typing that says nothing of real value, I just have to type enough to demonstrate this bug, or oversight possibly. At version number ten this is a hard to believe that this errant feature wasn't one of the first bugs fixed.
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