[techtalk] Any good HTML editors for Linux?

[Julie]

From: <Martin.Caitlyn at epamail.epa.gov>
> Julie wrote (in reverse order):
>
> > (proud vi user for 4 presidential administrations)
>
> I've only been using it for about six years.  I really have to admit I
came
> to UNIX late in my career, and Linux even later.  I originally *hated* vi.
> The learning curve was way steep and I found it counter-intuitive.  Once I
> got used to it, though, many of the commands became second nature, and now
> vi is definitely my editor of choice, simply because I know it so well.  I
> also recommend that people *do* learn it because every *nix under the
> sun has it.

There was a receptionist at a company where I worked about 15
years ago who was instructed to learn "vi" so she could write
memos while she wasn't being receptive.  Or whatever it is that
receptionists do.

ANYHOW, she had a really hard time with it, so I figured I'd point
her at the old curses version of "moria" so at least she'd be able
to learn the cursor movement commands and have a bit of fun
doing it.

Well, she learned "vi" very, very well that way.  Trouble was, she
also became so hooked on "moria" that she'd spend time when
she was supposed to be receptiving or memoing playing moria
and she wound up getting fired.

> >  Vim is the evil spawn of Satan.  It looks enough like vi to fool
> > you into believing it's vi.  Then it does something completely
> > weird and my brain overloads.
>
> Would you care to elaborate?  I *think* what Linux-Mandrake give you is
> vim, not vi.  Still, when I use it everything seems the same as on my *nix
> boxen at work.

Vim has some, ah, "improvements" that don't sit well with me.  One
of them is "progressive searching" where you start typing in your
search string and it starts searching right away.  I find it both
confusing and distracting and a general nuisance.  The other is that
it has a "more than one deep" undo buffer.  So sometimes I go to
undo an undo and wind up undoing a something else.

I don't "think" when I use vi -- it's all just very automatic.  So I wind
up doing things completely wrong because I've been habituated to
doing it some other way that no longer works like that.

> Also, this thread was originally about HTML editors, and I am still
finding
> it hard to believe people are recommending vi or even emacs as an HTML
> editor.  To me a non-WYSIWYG HTML editor is something like HomeSite is for
> Windows, where I have icons or menu items for common tools and tags, and
so
> long as I actually *know* what I'm doing and what tags to use I can
> actually save some fiddly steps in the coding.  The really good ones have
> CSS, PHP, and all sorts of esoteric support as well.  Neither vi nor emacs
> is anywhere near fitting the bill for me.  Hence my recommendation of
> Bluefish (my favorite), Quanta, SCREEM, or Webmaker.

My guess would be that some of us are very comfortable with writing
HTML and want complete control over the HTML we generate.  I've
tried using a few WYSIWIG HTML editors and they aren't nearly as
flexible as my knowledge of HTML and futzing with them to make them
do what I want takes longer than just giving up and doing it by hand.

If you look at my home page none of it was done with an HTML editor.
It's all hand-coded.

-- Julie.