Dreamweaver on Linux

December 22, 2006 6 By Tad Reeves

I’ve been trying for the last 2 years to find a decent web development platform for Linux, and still can’t find one. 

I truly don’t understand what the big deal is with porting Dreamweaver to Linux.  It already works on the Macintosh, so what would the big deal be making it work on QT or GTK+? 

I think that if there were a decent Dreamweaver port for linux, that would end up converting a TON of people to the Linux camp.  Seriously, for everyday work, I find GIMP totally acceptable for most photo work that I need to do for sites.  Sure, I love Fireworks and I love Photoshop, but it’s not a big block to getting website editing and development done.  I can make it work.

But in terms of development environments, all I’ve found for Linux are:

  • Quanta:   Great for PHP hackers, and great for the way that I develop sites (i.e. the site upload feature is very similar to dreamweavers).  However, the visual editor is terrible.  90% of the time that I’m using the visual editor in Dreamweaver, it’s for the purposes of SPEED.  I’m trying to select something, fix it, and move on.  Not navigate through someone else’s messed-up code and table layout to find something.  The Quanta visual editor doesn’t work at all, really – crashing on even the simplest of pages. 
  • Bluefish:  Just a glorified gEdit, as far as I’m concerned.
  • Aptana:  Looks really nifty, but I can’t get it to work at all on my FC6 box.  Also, has no visual editor, like Dreamweaver.
  • Mozilla Compozer: Would be almost usable if (a) it had a site upload / management setup like Dreamweaver (i.e. doesn’t assume you’re directly editing, via FTP, the files that run your website) and (b) if it didn’t horribly mangle your source code every time you make an edit.

I’m all for open source software, but in this case I can’t get around the NEED for Dreamweaver.   Anyone have any clues how to persuade Adobe to move ahead on this?

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