I Love Nvu – I Hate Nvu

For about the past 2 years I’ve used Nvu exclusively to create and edit web pages. For those of you who don’t know what Nvu is, it’s a full-featured WSIWYG (”What You See Is What You Get”) HTML editor. The really great thing about Nvu is that it’s an open source project and is very generously offered free of charge.

Unfortunately, being an open source project also has probably prevented Nvu from achieving its full potential.

I’m certainly very grateful to the development team of the Nvu project and I am very impressed with what they have produced. None of us should ever lose sight of the generous contributions that all open source project contributors make to the world at large. I’m sure many of us take for granted the efforts of contributors to such projects as Apache, WordPress, Joomla, and the list goes on and on of applications we use everyday day and couldn’t live without.

However, and I say this with all due respect, sometimes open source projects just fizzle out and come to a grinding halt leaving projects that showed such great potential a few yards short of the finish line. This can happen for a variety of reasons, not least of all is a lack of a financial imperative that drives software projects funded by businesses.

I’m afraid Nvu is one of those projects.

I’ve overlooked the frequent crashes and the gradual degradation of performance leading up to the inevitable crash. Many times for no apparent reason, basic features such as copy and paste and the “Save” button will just stop working. This is always a signal to close and reopen Nvu, but perhaps the most annoying “feature” of Nvu is it’s insistence in reformatting my code and in some cases, totally screwing it up. This has happened more times than I can really tolerate.

The really frustrating part of all this is the developer’s response in the Nvu user forum to a multitude of user complaints and pleas about these issues with Nvu. They have consistently replied that it shouldn’t matter if Nvu reformats code — HTML or PHP, since it will still be parsed correctly by both web browsers for HTML and by PHP engines for php server side scripts.

I concur, but my experience and that of others is that Nvu takes liberties beyond just stripping out newline characters and spaces.

The final straw for me was the other night when attempting to debug an error in a PHP script that referenced a line number. Not having a decent text editor, which I will be looking for shortly, I thought, “Hey, Nvu has line numbering…”.

Yep, big mistake!

Sure, I found the offending line number, but after I made the edits and saved the file, I discovered that Nvu had stripped out all of my pretty formatting and even worse, my script was even worse off than before.

Not only had Nvu stripped off the newline characters and indentation spaces, but had also removed the ending php tag along with a few other vital bits of syntax. Now I knew why other php developers were so aggravated with Nvu and the responses from the development team about how they were being unreasonable about Nvu reformatting their code.

Even if Nvu just stripped off what the development team considered to be useless cosmetic formatting, I’d still find that unacceptable. As a programmer I make an effort to format my code so it is readable by both myself and others viewing my code. A big part of this effort is the liberal use of tabs and white space. Sorry, that’s just my style and it’s what works for me. I don’t want a tool to get in the way of that, and unfortunately, Nvu gets in the way.

Big time.

So, it’s finally time to bid farewell to Nvu. It’s served me well and I’ve created numerous web sites and pages with it that I’m very happy with. It’s just a shame that the Nvu project seems to have stalled. I check the forum periodically, hopefully looking for updates that might make me reconsider dumping Nvu, but they never seem to come.