A Good Free HTML Editor

The title of this post: “A Good Free HTML Editor“, has become an oxymoron by now. The old adage, “you get what you pay for“, really applies in this case. One of the best known free WYSIWYG HTML editors has been Nvu. I wrote a lament about Nvu a while back. It has since been replaced by another open source project called kompoZer, which despite some feature enhancements, is still plagued by the same annoyances that Nvu was so infamous for. I won’t enumerate those annoyances again here. If you want to know more about what they are, just read my previous post linked to above.

I know there are other free HTML editors around, but I’ve never checked into them. Mainly because, I never held out much hope for them. There’s a reason why free and open source projects such as Nvu/kompoZer come up short and paid applications such as Adobe Dreamweaver cost so much.

It ain’t easy to design and build such an application.

Hence, you typically get what you pay for. As a result of my on-going frustration with Nvu, I was just about to bite the bullet and shell out the $400 or so that Dreamweaver will set you back. What made Nvu a real non-starter for me was the way it would muck with the code formatting, which is a huge pain when coding in PHP.

I finally resorted to using Microsoft’s Visual Studio .Net 2005 application. If you’ve never heard of this, then I’m not surprised. It’s what’s known as an “Integrated Development Environment” (IDE) and is targeted to folks who write code for Microsoft platforms — Windows in particular. I just so happened to have VS installed on my PC because of my former job. It was a way for me to do some extra (uncompensated) work at home for my employer.

It was actually out of desperation that I turned to VS.

As I was developing my RLPG landing page script, I needed an easy way to go directly to line numbers in my PHP text file. For anyone at all familiar with server-side scripting languages, this comes in real handy when attempting to debug errors. The error messages, along with a cryptic explanation of the error, contain the line number when the error occured. Often times, merely looking at the code on the offending line is enough to figure out what the problem is.

Visual Studio has such a feature and it can be quickly invoked with the keyboard shortcut CTRL-G.

Then it was only a matter of time where I was doing all my Web page coding right in VS — both HTML and PHP. A neat feature of VS is real time code validation. It shows missing closing tags and also identifies deprecated coding constructs. This is provided for both HTML and CSS. The color-coding of the various tags is also pretty neat.

Of course it’s not a WYSIWYG HTML editor, but I’m at the point that I can make do without it.

Then recently, after purchasing “Commission Blueprint” and becoming active on their members’ forum, I noticed that someone suggested I take a look at Microsoft’s “Visual Web Developer Express“. This was after I replied to several posts about the problems with Nvu and kompoZer. I mentioned that I got around the problem by using VS, but pointed out that it was expensive.

Turns out Visual Web Developer Express is a free download from Microsoft.

Say what you will about Microsoft and Windows, but after making a career out of developing software applications for their various platforms, I came to appreciate all the development tools they offer.

VWD is an excellent HTML editor with a lot of the same features I came to appreciate in VS with the big addition of being a true WYSIWYG HTML editor. It’s light years ahead of Nvu and approaches Dreamweaver in a lot of respects. Best of all, it’s completely free.

It even has a built-in FTP client, which I have chosen not to use since I’m so used to FileZilla, that for me to change would be too much of a shock. My only gripe is that it doesn’t have a spell checker. Apparently, someone from MS came out with a spell checker addin, but it won’t work for the Express version since it doesn’t support addins.

That’s OK. I’m such a lousy speller that even the best spell checkers don’t work 100% for me. Crappy spelling has sort of become a trademark for me.

So if you’re in a bind for an HTML editor and don’t want to shell out big bucks for Dreamweaver and Nvu/kompoZer have left you hanging, I highly recommend you take VWD for a spin. It may look a bit geeky, which makes sense since it’s targeted to developers, but if you don’t let that overwhelm you and you give it a chance, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with just how good it is.

Visual Web Developer Express