Looking for software recommendations

[SallyK]

I've got a friend who's looking for a couple of kinds of open source software, preferably ones that run on Windows and Linux, so he can carry on using them when he switches to Linux, which he'd like to do sometime in the next year or so.

I've been using Linux for quite a while, but not for these purposes, so I'm not sure what to recommend to him, and I was hoping someone here might be able to help.

First, he's looking for a replacement for Dreamweaver, basically a WYSIWYG web editor that produces compliant code.

Second, he keeps a lot of cut out sections from tech magazines etc, that he'd like to find some way to file and index, so he can find them again - maybe combined with scanning them, so he'd have a copy on the computer he can refer to. I don't know if such a thing exists, but I figured that if it did, it was quite likely to be open source.

Thank you to anyone who can help.

[rg4w]

If there's a solid DW replacement available for Linux I haven't found it. Kompozer isn't a bad WYSIWYG editor at all, but nowhere near the scope of features that DW has.

The only upside may be that so many modern web apps are almost entirely unsuitable for WYSIWYG layouts anyway, being comprised of dynamic regions. For such things I've found a simple text editor hard to beat.

I'll be checking this thread to see if anyone posts an alternative to Kompozer. Would be nice to see a solid DW-like tool for Linux.

[SallyK]

Thank you, I'll pass that on to him.

I get the impression that WYSIWYG editors got a bad name, because most of them produced bad code, but it's a shame that no-one was inspired to produce a better one.

[linuxforartists]

BlueFish (http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/index.html) is the closest open source-equivalent of DreamWeaver I've found. Though I mostly use Geany (http://www.geany.org/) and jEdit (http://www.jedit.org/). Those are text editors, not WYSIWYG programs.

As for managing scanned copies of magazine articles, a good fit would be Nevernote (http://nevernote.sourceforge.net/). It's an open-source clone of an app called Evernote (http://www.evernote.com/about/learn_more/). You scan in an article, and the text recognition will pick up what's written. Then you add tags to describe the content. Later, you can do a search for a tag, and that article will pop up.

Kudos to you for helping your friend find open-source programs. I wouldn't be using Linux today if I hadn't had a very patient buddy who basically served as tech support during my first year with Ubuntu.

[Dustin2128]

Aptana is a good IDE for site development, but no WYSIWYG. I use dreamweaver on occasion, but personally the only thing I really find it useful for is visualizing the length/width of layers or table cells. But really, moving away from DW would be the best thing to do- I can''t even figure out what the wysiwyg is supposed to look like- certainly not any known browsers. And no HTML5 support (in the version I use at least). Emacs is the way to go. Also, seamonkey has a WYSIWYG that isn't half bad.

[SallyK]

Thank you both for further suggestions - Never/Evernote does sound well worth checking out.

I hadn't heard of BlueFish before, but hopefully it or Kompozer will do the trick.

[Tim Thumb]

Bluefish is good, but as has been noted, is no Dreamweaver.

In my humble opinion, getting away from WYSIWYG may seem painful at first, but in the long run you become a much more powerful developer.