It never ceases to amaze me the amount of free programs out there as an alternative to the commercial ones. NVU is an open source web design package that can be used in both design and code view. If you are looking for a WYSIWYG editor and don’t want to pay out a few hundred pounds/dollars for Dreamweaver NVU may be worth taking a look at, it’s available for Mac, PC and Linux to download for free.
Features as listed on the NVU site:
- WYSIWYG editing of pages, making web creation as easy as typing a letter with your word processor.
- Integrated file management via FTP. Simply login to your web site and navigate through your files, editing web pages on the fly, directly from your site.
- Reliable HTML code creation that will work with all of today’s most popular browsers.
- Jump between WYSIWYG Editing Mode and HTML using tabs.
- Tabbed editing to make working on multiple pages a snap.
- Powerful support for forms, tables, and templates.
Take a look also at Rachael at Calmbanana’s posts about designing a website for free and Design Vitality’s post on 25 Open Source Web Design Programs
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17 Comments
NVU is a bit outdated now. It’s pretty buggy, the site management is weak, the CSS tools are unintuitive. It’s useful, but I’d stay more current.
You are way better of learning a little HTML and using Aptana, as you can live edit right on the server. Once you use Aptana and live edit, you’ll be unhappy with anything else, I guarantee it.
Besides NVU has also been superceded by Kompozer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KompoZer
Kompozer is based on NVU, and it’s last release was august 2007, whereas NVU hasn’t been changed since 2005.
Also, check out Seamonkey, which is the latest full mozilla suite and includes an HTML editor. Seamonkey just had a release a week ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey
with that said, I do appreciate the work that was put into NVU. It has helped alot of people.
Thanks for the links Mick
Thanks for the info Tara. I’ve never used this program, but even just a glance at the interface I see that it may be even more confusing and cluttered than Dreamweaver to use! That’s a hard feat to accomplish.
Instead, why not try low-cost BBEdit for the Mac or even low-cost TextMate, the latter of which includes code snippets and compilers for a wide-arrange of languages? These programs keep their interface simple and intuitive. BBEdit even tabs multiple documents and does finds in multiple documents.
Thanks Louisa
I actually have Dreamweaver on my mac I found NVU while on my PC laptop and thought it might be worthwhile for anyone who didn’t want to pay for dreamweaver, Mike has made some good alternative suggestions though. Thanks for your suggestions for text editors too.
DW is just a waste of disk space these days. I thought once it was purchased by Adobe, that it might improve; however, it’s bloated and buggy and slow. I give it an “F”. It even manages to run slowly on my new 2.8Ghz iMac with 4GB of memory!
@Mike Smick
I’ve just downloaded Aptana. It looks absolutely fantastic. I can’t believe I’ve never come across this before. After less than 10 minutes with it, I have now uninstalled DW (what a painful waste of money that was). Thanks for starting this discussion, Tara.
Hi Johno
I think I might try Aptana on my PC and see how I get on too. I have only ever dabbled with dreamweaver and TABLES which I couldn’t really work out, but hopefull either the new DW or Aptana might be useful for my measley new CSS skills
.
Aptana looks quite interesting, although pretty focussed on JavaScript development. Can anyone tell me what its like for working with PHP – ie colour-coding and suggestive coding?
NVU is very limited from a web developer point of view. Other than HTML it doesn’t really have much use. For a text editor I would recomend jEdit.
I’m so anal about my markup that I do absolutely everything by hand in trusty ol’ notepad. It hasn’t failed me yet. ^_^
Oh for the PC then? You have even more options than on the Mac! You even have code editors for your mobile devices that run on a Windows platform.
Windows control 90% or so of every type of program disagree? Well its properly something close to that anyway . I am well up for the mac though i like my Ibook g4 laptop because its excellent when i have multiple windows you can press the F9 key and it opens all windows it small sections. It makes it easier to switch between windows, anyone that has a mac will no what i mean.
Yeah, notepad ++ ftw~!
NVU is a very good alternative as a free html editor. Works very well, I find it better than frontpage. Dreamweaver is good but again you have to pay for it.
Terry NVU is a excelant alternative works well for me…I live in S.Africa withour exchange rate it is exspensive.. to keep up with the software trends..I would love a MAC..work in progress…Thanks you all for all the links!!!
Can’t really comment on NVU specifically, but I know there are a few open source options out there. I used to use a Linux package years back that I absolutely loved – Quanta Plus, but I have since started hand-coding using XCode on a Mac. It has good code highlighting for HTML in Leopard, so I’m happy about that.
Nvu has been superseded by Kompozer and its great I use it almost every day
I found A great set of video tutorials for kompozer that have help me and save me so much time click here for Kompozer
Tutorials
Hey Tara,
I can definitely recommend Aptana! It’s a great little piece of software and it’s completely free! Once you get used it, it even works better than Dreamweaver. The autocomplete functions for your HTML, CSS and Javascript work perfectly.
Soon Aptana 3.0 is coming out. Definitely worth downloading, if you ask me.