Dragonfly Networks

I’ve been looking for a good visual HTML/CSS editor, and although it was a bit of a handful to get it running, I now have Nvu running on my Debian laptop. I also just discovered Quanta Plus, which was installed by default with KDE (I think), so I’ll be attempting to learn one or both of these over the coming weeks.
When I found the Nvu website and read the summaries and looked at the screenshots, I got a tiny bit excited. It’s an open-source WYSIWYG editor for web pages that can (in theory) handle CSS, integrates with ftp/ssh site management, handles HTML forms, and is described on the Nvu website as being similar to Dreamweaver or Frontpage.

This would be helpful on some projects, obviously; my current technique of having a console window open with a screen session running, with the stylesheet on one screen, the header on another, the sidebar on another, the footer on yet another screen, (I know - it’s absolutely insane! but on the other hand, once you learn how to toggle from screen to screen with keyboard commands, it’s nearly instantaneous, and then you can alt-tab to your browser, hit F5, and see what your edits did, pretty quickly) well; that technique works fairly well for me, but it’s certainly a little cumbersome.

Ideally, I’d have a dual-screen setup when I do web development, with Firefox open and full-screened on the right, and the CSS/HTML files I’m editing on the left. I’d be able to make edits to the stylesheet, and whenever I saved the edit, the Firefox session would detect the file change and refresh the page automatically. That would be pretty slick.

Also, it would be helpful to be able to use a small set of graphic-design tools (i.e. bucket fill, gradient fill, replace color, etc) on a page mockup in realtime. Actually, Dreamweaver would be a fairly useful tool for the work I do (and for our company) if it ran on Linux, was free, and handled W3C compliant HTML generation a little better.

In any case, I’ll be updating this post every once in a while to let you know how it goes.