CoffeeBear.net

Favorite Web Development Tools?

Posted by Mark | Filed under QotD

As you might imag­ine, I’m bored at work¹ and I’m try­ing to come up with some­thing to keep my brain alive. So here’s another QotD² for you; what are your favorite web devel­op­ment tools?

My response is slightly com­pli­cated because I use both Linux & Win­dows and use dif­fer­ent tools under each. Note that these lists are pre­sented in no par­tic­u­lar order.

Linux Web Devel­op­ment Tools

• Quanta for edit­ing HTML, CSS & PHP.
• Blue­fish is another good tool for edit­ing HTML, CSS & PHP but its inter­face just feels a lot more clutured.
• GIMP for edit­ing images, though to be per­fectly hon­est I hate using it because the inter­face is just wretched. Unfor­tu­nately, I’m not aware of another image edi­tor that I can use under Linux which has the func­tion­al­ity that I need.

Win­dows Web Devel­op­ment Tools

• UltraEdit is the best text edi­tor for Win­dows. Period. It’s not free but there is a time-limited demo. You can edit pretty much any­thing with UltraEdit and there are addi­tional wordlists & dic­tio­nar­ies for it to make it even eas­ier to use. Though as I recall CSS is not included with the default word list –this means UltraEdit won’t do syn­tax high­light­ing for CSS by default– but an addi­tional wordlist can be down­loaded to take care of that.
• Fire­works MX is the best image edit­ing pro­gram, par­tic­u­larly for web work. It’s inter­face feels very well laid out, hid­ing options you don’t imme­di­ately need and group­ing sim­i­lar options together. Plus, it uses Adobe Photoshop’s plu­gin archi­tec­ture allow­ing you to eas­ily expand the func­tion­al­ity of the soft­ware. Again, this isn’t free soft­ware but there is a time-limited demo. Unfor­tu­nately, the Cross­weavers ver­sion of Wine lists this pro­gram as Known Not to Run; so I won’t be run­ning this under Linux any time soon. *sigh*

¹ For the record, I am work­ing right now. I’m try­ing to get the pro­gram I test to gen­er­ate some errors so I can test some new func­tion­al­ity that the pro­gram­mers added to the error han­dling. Nat­u­rally now that I want the pro­gram to break; it’s not. *sigh*
² QotD (acronym): There are 2 gen­er­ally accecpted mean­ings for this acronym,

1. Quote of the Day
2. Ques­tion of the Day

Unless oth­er­wise noted, this site uses the 2nd definition.

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