Review: Quanta Plus 3.5
Editor: Quanta Plus
Version: 3.5.2
Developer: Quanta Plus Development Team
Platform/OS: Linux/KDE
WYSIWYG: No
Price: Free
My first Linux adventures began in 2000 thanks to Corel. Since then, I’ve been fascinated and frustrated by the open source OS, always wanting to spend more time in Linux but inevitably returning to Windows to get things done. My obvious attraction to Linux and open source software is the philosophy on which they are built: create, share, and improve. Moreover, the fact that such impressive software is available at little to no cost has always been an incredible bonus.
Now that Linux is becoming even more user friendly, thanks to distros like Mandriva and the extremely popular Ubuntu, more people are choosing Linux as their primary web development environment. As a result, Linux HTML editors are starting to come into their own with more features and functionality than ever before. One of the oldest, most robust Linux HTML editors is Quanta Plus.
What I Like
- Code hinting and code completion for HTML, CSS, and PHP!
- It’s free! Linux and the open source community never cease to surprise and delight. Many of the products I use everyday are open source and often free. Beyond that, they’re excellent programs, and Quanta Plus is no exception.
- Dynamic wordwrap. I tend not to use word wrap in most editors because lines get wapped back to the left-most edge of the editor. Quanta Plus, however, respects the indentation of the previous line and wraps accordingly.
- Tab/indent indicators. Not a big deal, but I like them and most editors I use don’t have this option.
- Code folding.
- Wizards and buttons for creating tables, lists, and forms. Not as nice as those found in WeBuilder, but useful nonetheless.
- The Document Structure side panel. Nice for getting a quick overview of functions, variables, inclusions, links, and overall document structure. Clicking on a name (of a variable or tag, for instance) in the side panel also takes you to where it’s located in the source code. However, I was able to repeatedly crash Quanta Plus by clicking on a variable that was listed under an included file (i.e., a variable that wasn’t in the current document).
Gripes
- For some reason, I couldn’t get CSS code hinting and code completion to work in new CSS documents, only in
<style>blocks within HTML documents and in existing CSS files. - The VPL editor seems unstable. I was never sure it was actually working, and there were some visual stutters when creating and editing content. For some pages, it didn’t display everything that the internal preview displayed. Pretty useless overall.
- This is more of a KDE UI gripe, but I don’t like how configuration is spread across a number of areas in the menu — Configure Preview, Configure Actions, Configure Plug-ins, Configure Toolbars, Configure Editor, Configure Quanta, etc. At the same time, having all those options under one “Configure” menu item would probably be too overwhelming.
- There are no snippets in Quanta Plus and no way to create your own.
Wishlist
- Improved VPL editor. I often use Dreamweaver’s “Design View” for editing lots of content, and the VPL editor in Quanta Plus would be especially handy for this as well, if it were more stable.
- Snippets — either like TopStyle/WeBuilder or like TextMate.
- Fix the Document Structure crash bug listed above.
- CSS code hinting is new CSS documents.
Overall
In terms of functionality, there’s not a lot missing from Quanta Plus. I like the interface and the program is fairly intuitive to use. Future versions and bug fixes will likely make this an incredible development environment, and while I wouldn’t say that it’s currently worth switching to Linux for, if you already develop sites on Linux, Quanta Plus is definitely worth looking into.
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I’ve been using ‘Cssed Editor’ and ‘gPHPEdit’ on Ubuntu 6.10 for my webdev needs. I rarely use Bluefish.
I just downloaded/installed Quanta. It may be a newer version than the last one I tried.
Comment by jamjammo — April 19, 2007 @ 12:48 am
Hinting works in new CSS documents, you just have to change the DTD to CSS.
I agree that there are a few weird interface things with Quanta but there are also some things it does better than other editors. I’ve been using it as my regular editor lately mainly because it does HTML auto-completion the way I want it to (after you type </, not immediately after you finish the opening tag). I also don’t know of any other Linux editors that do CSS hinting, but maybe I’ll have to look around your site a bit more to find them :)
I also find that it works well over SSH connections, which was really important to me. Some editors would crash or refuse to open files directly. (Quanta works better this way when ssh-ing via Konquerer).
Comment by Megan — February 3, 2008 @ 12:09 pm
I’m an old school HTML geek who still writes HTML/CSS/PHP/Javascript code out by hand. My favorite comparable editors in the past have been Arachnophilia 4.0 (real old school), 1st Page 2000, and Allaire Homesite (which was the best of its era, with project management and ability to inline preview even PHP on a local server). This is hands-down the best and most comparable to Homesite. I’ve tried Bluefish and several general ‘programmer’ tools like VIM and eclipse, and this one is very well optimized towards HTML/PHP development. My favorite features here is the way that it manages projects, as well as how the interface is laid out. I usually have the project manager open as a sidebar on the left, showing all of the documents of the current web project on the left, and if I right click on one I can perform various actions such as quick upload and open. Most actions can be assigned hotkeys: for example if I want to upload the document i’m working on, all I have to do is press ALT+SHIFT+U, and the document i’m currently working on is uploaded instantly. Quanta has an ENORMOUS amount of functionality, and like most KDE apps, its all there and ready to be used, but truthfully, you will only use a small amount of it at a time. Fans of lightweight text editors might scoff at having so much functionality/bloat in a web editor, however in my view, the project management and one click uploads make such bloat worth enduring. The only thing this editor seems to lack is the Snippets, as previously mentioned, as well as “Open folder in file browser” that I would like to see in the project manager column.
Comment by David Bobb — May 31, 2008 @ 8:12 am