Got Dreamweaver envy? Go on, admit it. Macromedia Dreamweaver (and Adobe GoLive, among others) is a powerful tool that can help make Web design an enjoyable, creative experience, rather than a menial coding headache. But if you are a Linux developer, or if you simply couldn't afford expensive software, you were out in the cold... until now.
Even Dreamweaver users may want to stop and take a look at Nvu, a free, open source Web design environment with Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine at the heart of its WYSIWYG HTML editor.
Nvu runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and even though this is only the second beta release of the software, it's already got a solid feature set, including:
* multiple file editing with tabs
* multiple views per file: HTML, tags, WYSIWYG, and Preview
* strong CSS support
* site file management with integrated FTP
* on-the-fly spell checking
Power users may miss a few features of the commercial packages, like Secure FTP (Blane suggests a work-around in his blog entry), pop-up code hints, server-side coding, and testing servers. But if the momentum of this project is maintained I expect all that and more will eventually be added.
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