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miriam_eI first started writing web pages using html (hypertext markup language) a little more than twenty years ago. I used a number of text editors on my Amiga computer, but my favorite was dme. This editor was very small, extremely fast, and had easily customisable keys and menus, and a macro facility that allowed me to replay sequences of commands. I came to appreciate minimalist html and its power.
Later I moved to Microsoft Windows when Amiga's corporate owners were in the throes of death. I found Netscape Gold was a useful html editor with a nice wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) interface, so I could see my font styles and embedded pictures immediately. Very nice. It wrote all its tags in uppercase, which bugged me -- capitals are much harder to read than lowercase -- but that was really only a small niggle.
After a while Netscape Gold became superseded by other Mozilla web browsers with html editors built in, but they began to become more and more plagued by a tendency to produce overly complex html. Eventually this drove me in search of a better solution.
I found it in the form of TextPad (http://textpad.com), the best text editor I've ever seen. This is a wonderfully flexible text editor, with reassignable key-commands, macros, the best search-replace function I've ever seen anywhere, and the ability to create lists of text snippets that can be inserted anywhere in your document with simply a mouse click. TextPad is not wysiwyg, but it lets me keep my code absolutely simple, just the way I like it, and it is an utter delight to use. You can use the demo version forever, but I loved it so much I bought a copy.
Later I finally moved to Linux. I'd been experimenting with many flavors of Linux for years before I was shown Puppy Linux. It was tiny compared to all other Linux distributions, and surprisingly full-featured. It was also very fast -- something I needed as my computers were rather dated, and, sadly, operating systems and other software generally become slower as they "develop". I had to start looking again for a good way to write html. TextPad ran only on Microsoft Windows. Mozilla still had html editors, in fact one (Seamonkey) was included as standard in Puppy Linux, but the html produced was messy and unnecessarily verbose. It really got up my nose. The same is true of virtually all the wordprocessors I've tried; they can output html but it is absurdly convoluted and verbose garbage. For example, instead of surrounding a bit of italics text with <i>sample text</i>, they might do something like <c props="font-style:italic">sample text</c> or a similar kind of thing with the <span> tag, often with numerous superfluous tags where font color will be repeatedly be defined as black, when it only needs to be defined once, in the <body> tag, and text styles repeatedly given as having no decoration or no indent, or other silliness that explicitly defines the default condition.
Geany is a small, fast, surprisingly capable text editor that comes with Puppy, and I use it often, but I still miss a lot of the abilities TextPad gives.
I ended up installing Wine on Puppy Linux to let me run TextPad inside a faked MSWindows environment. This worked nicely and let me continue to use this sweet editor. However it niggles at me that I must fake MSWindows in order to run TextPad. Surely there must be a text editor in the Linux world which compares in power and ease of use.
Over the years I've asked around and really only been told of one editor which comes close in power: Vi. But it fails miserably in ease of use. It has a massive learning curve because it does everything differently from just about every other text editor ever made. This isn't Vi's fault; it preceded the development of the interface standards that have helped to unify computers, lower learning curves, and make it easier for people to use them. Interface standards let knowledge be transferable; what you learned on one program was largely applicable to another. Vi missed out on that, but is an undeniably powerful program.
Recently I took another look at vi. I was still looking for a useful Linux-based text editor and many people who I admire had urged me to give it a proper go, so I couldn't ignore it. While investigating further I happened to stumble across a project called cream, which is a set of vi macros that sit on top of it to create an interface that largely fits the standards, yet underneath it is still vi (vim actually -- the gui version of vi) with all the power of that program. This looked very promising. The version I initially tried was 0.41. It was nice, but a little buggy. I use it from time to time, but tended to stick with TextPad for its power, simplicity, ease of use, and reliability.
But the itch has bitten again. I notice version 0.42 of cream is available and I'm downloading it as I write this. I know it still won't come close to TextPad's extraordinary abilities, but it is a step in the right direction.
So, my question:
Does anybody know of a powerful text editor for Linux that lets you create macros, and search and replace regular expressions across end-of-line characters? Even better if it has click-insertable, user-customisable libraries of arbitary text.
Also does anyone know a wysiwyg html editor or wordprocessor for Linux that outputs minimal html?
Later I moved to Microsoft Windows when Amiga's corporate owners were in the throes of death. I found Netscape Gold was a useful html editor with a nice wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) interface, so I could see my font styles and embedded pictures immediately. Very nice. It wrote all its tags in uppercase, which bugged me -- capitals are much harder to read than lowercase -- but that was really only a small niggle.
After a while Netscape Gold became superseded by other Mozilla web browsers with html editors built in, but they began to become more and more plagued by a tendency to produce overly complex html. Eventually this drove me in search of a better solution.
I found it in the form of TextPad (http://textpad.com), the best text editor I've ever seen. This is a wonderfully flexible text editor, with reassignable key-commands, macros, the best search-replace function I've ever seen anywhere, and the ability to create lists of text snippets that can be inserted anywhere in your document with simply a mouse click. TextPad is not wysiwyg, but it lets me keep my code absolutely simple, just the way I like it, and it is an utter delight to use. You can use the demo version forever, but I loved it so much I bought a copy.
Later I finally moved to Linux. I'd been experimenting with many flavors of Linux for years before I was shown Puppy Linux. It was tiny compared to all other Linux distributions, and surprisingly full-featured. It was also very fast -- something I needed as my computers were rather dated, and, sadly, operating systems and other software generally become slower as they "develop". I had to start looking again for a good way to write html. TextPad ran only on Microsoft Windows. Mozilla still had html editors, in fact one (Seamonkey) was included as standard in Puppy Linux, but the html produced was messy and unnecessarily verbose. It really got up my nose. The same is true of virtually all the wordprocessors I've tried; they can output html but it is absurdly convoluted and verbose garbage. For example, instead of surrounding a bit of italics text with <i>sample text</i>, they might do something like <c props="font-style:italic">sample text</c> or a similar kind of thing with the <span> tag, often with numerous superfluous tags where font color will be repeatedly be defined as black, when it only needs to be defined once, in the <body> tag, and text styles repeatedly given as having no decoration or no indent, or other silliness that explicitly defines the default condition.
Geany is a small, fast, surprisingly capable text editor that comes with Puppy, and I use it often, but I still miss a lot of the abilities TextPad gives.
I ended up installing Wine on Puppy Linux to let me run TextPad inside a faked MSWindows environment. This worked nicely and let me continue to use this sweet editor. However it niggles at me that I must fake MSWindows in order to run TextPad. Surely there must be a text editor in the Linux world which compares in power and ease of use.
Over the years I've asked around and really only been told of one editor which comes close in power: Vi. But it fails miserably in ease of use. It has a massive learning curve because it does everything differently from just about every other text editor ever made. This isn't Vi's fault; it preceded the development of the interface standards that have helped to unify computers, lower learning curves, and make it easier for people to use them. Interface standards let knowledge be transferable; what you learned on one program was largely applicable to another. Vi missed out on that, but is an undeniably powerful program.
Recently I took another look at vi. I was still looking for a useful Linux-based text editor and many people who I admire had urged me to give it a proper go, so I couldn't ignore it. While investigating further I happened to stumble across a project called cream, which is a set of vi macros that sit on top of it to create an interface that largely fits the standards, yet underneath it is still vi (vim actually -- the gui version of vi) with all the power of that program. This looked very promising. The version I initially tried was 0.41. It was nice, but a little buggy. I use it from time to time, but tended to stick with TextPad for its power, simplicity, ease of use, and reliability.
But the itch has bitten again. I notice version 0.42 of cream is available and I'm downloading it as I write this. I know it still won't come close to TextPad's extraordinary abilities, but it is a step in the right direction.
So, my question:
Does anybody know of a powerful text editor for Linux that lets you create macros, and search and replace regular expressions across end-of-line characters? Even better if it has click-insertable, user-customisable libraries of arbitary text.
Also does anyone know a wysiwyg html editor or wordprocessor for Linux that outputs minimal html?
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-08 02:48 pm (UTC)I can see the utility of CSS for managing many webpages if the same look is wanted for them all. Either a style in the head of each or an external css file defines the look for the lot. If you later want to make some modifications to the look of all the pages it is relatively easy to alter either the external css file or the style definition in the head of each page. There is terrific good sense in using CSS for that. But mostly that isn't what CSS is used for. It is simply used for making pages look different.
I never saw the sense in making pages look anything other than what they are: just plain webpages. I'm not saying other people shouldn't play around with the look. I'm simply saying it's not what I like to do.
Far too often I've seen CSS become an obstacle to sensible webpage design. It seems to be a growing trend to make the bulk of a page govern the look, and the minority of it convey actual information. In the current craze for appearance many people seem to have forgotten that webpages are perhaps primarily for passing on information. I'm an artist, so I'm not opposed to people using appearance to add an emotional or stylistic dimension to information. Unfortunately there often seems to be a push to be different simply for the sake of being different, leading to big problems on the web. Mostly it is used where it simply is not needed.
In the past I've used CSS... sparingly. And I'll continue to use it occasionally, but mostly I need only the classic tags. Pages that use minimal markup are very easy to maintain and are viewable in all kinds of browsers and machines. Every time more CSS is added to what is increasingly laughably called the "standard" it breaks more browsers. Far from being more cross-browser compliant, CSS actually makes it impossible to be viewable everywhere.
In the end I'm always wary of fashions (in computing as in everything else) and it worries me that CSS is largely fashion-driven. Something that you can guarantee about the fashionable: they will later be out of fashion, and there are few things more ugly than old fashions.
I'm not fundamentally opposed to CSS, and I've seen people do nice things with it (Paws and Effect looks clear and easy to read, for instance), but I've also seen way too many pages that don't display properly because of CSS and that are bulked up with 90% markup, clogging the net with largely useless traffic.
At the html writing end it encourages programmers to stuff editors with unnecessary tags and styles instead of being efficient. It is no wonder we get bloated pages and slow web traffic.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-08 03:05 pm (UTC)I'll admit that CSS can be pretty cranky as far as cross-browser functionality, and there certainly are a ton of work-arounds to make things display properly in IE, Firefox, etc. That's one reason why I primarily use CSS to control font styles and things like borders and dividing lines: I leave the grunt work of writing codes for column settings and the like to the real programmers. :-)
I'm also wary of the "bells and whistles over substance" mentality. There was a lot of that when Flash-driven sites were all the rage. And speaking of RAGE, there's nothing that pisses me off like zip-ding Flash sites of the types that web design and marketing agencies put together in the early 200os--before people began to realize that a) Flash interferes with accessibility standards because of the lack of "alt" text and b) web readers can't "see" the text in the Flash files. Flash is great for computer games; for websites, not so much.
I'd be more inclined to think of CSS as a passing fad like Flash, except for the fact that more and more designers are working with CSS because they're seeing that despite the crankiness and kludges, CSS works pretty much seamlessly with PHP-driven content management systems like WordPress, DotNetNuke, and the like. I've been seeing browsers become more consistently compatible with standardized CSS code (except for IE, because pretty much everything about Microsoft web browsers and HTML coding sucks).
When I design web content or print content, I follow the axiom "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." Sooner or later, all the zip-ding-wow-look-at-my-crazy-CSS crowd will calm down, just as the zip-ding-look-at-my-Java-apps and the zip-ding-look-at-my-animated-GIF-spinning-pentacles and the zip-ding-look-at-my-blink-tag people did. :-)
no subject
Date: 2010-01-08 10:56 pm (UTC)Unfortunately the flash-fashion is still very big in some places. It sometimes seems the more wealthy a company is, the more unusable and flash-dependent is their website.... of course, a more positive view of that is that, in some ways this levels the playing field; we ordinary folk tend to have the most readable pages.