HTML editors: Nvu and Bluefish

The Nvu web site promises "A complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver." How close does Nvu come to delivering on that promise?

To evaluate Nvu, one must first install the software. At the time of this writing, the Nvu website offers packages for Lindows, Fedora Core 2 test 1 and Windows. Other interested parties must compile the application from source. While this does not usually present a major hurdle for Linux users, Nvu is not available in anything so straightforward as a source tarball. The instructions, such as they are, instruct the user to pull Mozilla from CVS, save a modified .mozconfig into the Mozilla source directory, download a separate patch from Nvu and finally compile the software. One almost gets the impression that the Nvu developers are looking to make life difficult for non-Lindows users.

After jumping through the numerous hoops required to compile Nvu, we set about evaluating the software. Since Nvu is derived from Mozilla's Composer, we decided to open both applications up side-by-side to see what improvements had been made to Composer. Nvu is not drastically different from Composer, but there are a few new features worth noting. Nvu has some obvious cosmetic differences, and offers an improved tabbed interface for multiple document editing. It also includes a "Site Manager" Sidebar, which is not available in Composer.

Another feature touted for Nvu is the ability to create templates that have read-only sections and editable sections. Unfortunately, our attempts to work with templates were less than successful. After creating and saving a template, an attempt to create a new document based on a simple template caused Nvu to promptly crash.

Nvu also includes "CaScadeS," a CSS editor that allows fine-grained control over the styles applied to elements in your documents. The feature is interesting, but slightly counter-intuitive. To invoke the editing menu for a specific element, the user must right-click on an element displayed in a menu displayed at the bottom of the editor. If the user is unaware of the feature, it's quite likely that it will go completely unnoticed. Once one is aware of the feature, it is easy to use. However, it would be much more intuitive if the user was able to right-click on the element itself in the editing pane to bring up the CaScadeS menu.

Nvu shows a great deal of promise, but it's not quite ready for a showdown with Macromedia's Dreamweaver.

The Bluefish Web development tool takes a different approach with its "What You See is What You Need" interface. Users who wish to try out the recent 0.13 release will appreciate that Bluefish is provided in a straight-forward source tarball. Unlike Nvu, Bluefish's feature set is more appropriate for the experienced Web developer working on more advanced projects, including dynamic sites that make use of PHP, Perl, Python and other scripting languages. Bluefish includes syntax highlighting for a host of languages, everything from HTML to ColdFusion is represented.

It takes some time to fully explore Bluefish and all its features. Bluefish provides a number of wizards and dialogs that make it much easier to add forms, tables and so forth to a document. This writer particularly likes Bluefish's custom menu, which allows the user to create their own dialogs to generate snippets of code. The "Quickbar," which allows users to add frequently-used buttons from other toolbars, is also a favorite.

Bluefish offers Web developers as much, or as little, assistance as they need. A user can opt to use Bluefish as a souped-up text editor with excellent syntax highlighting, or rely on Bluefish to generate much of their code through wizards and dialogs.

Another nice thing about Bluefish is that it integrates well with other tools that Web developers often use. Users can pipe their files in Bluefish through HTML Tidy, Weblint and other programs to validate their HTML, or easily configure Bluefish to open their work in their browser(s) of choice.

Despite the low version number, Bluefish is fairly mature and very stable. It's well worth a look for users who want a flexible Web development environment.

There are, of course, a number of other open source Web development tools for Linux. The Screem website development package is fairly popular, as is Quanta Plus, which we touched on when KDE 3.2 was released. For many, no IDE or GUI-based tool can replace Emacs or Vim for churning out websites.

None of the tools available for Linux are quite slick and polished as Dreamweaver, but there are certainly plenty of options for users who are looking for a suitable open source Web development tool.