2007-13-10 My Tools

I was quite inspired of these two posts: Go With The GIMP! (by Catherine) and Make a website for free #1 (by Rachael). So I thought I’d write about how I make my modest website in Ubuntu.

Graphics

Naturally it’s GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. I’m not going to go into GIMP vs. Photoshop conversation (mainly because I have almost no experience at all of Photoshop).
I’ve been using GIMP now quite many years (already when I was Windows user and now when I have Ubuntu). And so far there hasn’t been anything I couldn’t do with it. On the other hand I don’t demand that much, this doesn’t mean you couldn’t use GIMP also in bigger works.

GIMP art at deviantART
GIMPtalk

Coding

For coding I use usually Bluefish and occasionally also Ubuntu’s Text Editor. Recently I found Quanta Plus, it’s a text-editor part of KDE. Quanta seems pretty good, though it doesn’t exactly integrate with Gnome desktop environment, though I find this quite minor thing.

Bluefish is pretty much similar as other text-editors I have used (for example Notepad++ or $TSW$ Web Coder). It has syntax highlighting, tree view and several coding related features. My favourite features are quite obvious and modest: spell checking and search+replace (all) and have to admit I like when it adds automatically the ending tags.

Text Editor is, well, a text editor, with syntax highlighting and tabs. Very practical even in bigger jobs, because of the highlighting. Actually only thing why use Bluefish more is that it has the tree view. What I really love is spell checking (which I didn’t have as a default in Windows), this doesn’t stop me making mistakes but I think I do them less than before. I think it’s useless to compare this to Window’s Notepad (except by saying this is far better).

Other stuff

I was using Filezilla in Windows too and was very happy when I noticed I could carry on using it. Filezilla is free open source ftp client (released under GNU General Public License), and so far it has been best and easiest FTP-client to use. It’s a cross-platform so it makes it’s even better.

Firefox and Textpattern aren’t related to Ubuntu so much, but they are free and open source and I’m using both to maintain Moonthology.org up. In Firefox the most important tools for me are Web Developer ‘s toolbar, Screengrab! and HTML-validator (I recommend checking also this, apparently add-on has bigger and smaller problems but at least in Ubuntu 7.04 it has been working fine). I have also other browers for testing, like: Opera, ELinks and Epiphany, but no Internet Explorer. Textpattern is a CMS, I’m using it to keep my blog/archives and contact form up. So far I haven’t had energy to convert rest of the site managed by TXP.