Nvu I want to use you.

Nvu is yet another spawn of the Mozilla family. This time, non-Mozilla employees ripped out Composer, the HTML editor that can be found in the Mozilla Suite. They then re-worked it into a stand alone application called Nvu.

Now I was all excited to hear about this project. How could it be bad? Well I’ve been using Nvu 1.0 for a while now and I have to say I’m disappointed. Maybe I was expecting to much or something, but it’s not as great as I hoped.

Yes it does have a WYSIWYG editor, along with three other modes and they work well. It also has a built in site manager and has a feel similar to Firefox and Thunderbird. There are good things, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t get around the bad.

My Issues
1) Nvu always adds and tags to the source. Sometimes I just want to edit a block of code w/o those tags.
2) No PHP support.
3) The site manager screws up image paths if you don’t save your file before publishing, or if you tell it to publish images on the page.
4) No way to upload one graphic that I’ve seen.
5) If a page is missing an element when you download it in the site manager, you get error messages that don’t say ‘missing image.jpg’ or something else initiative.
6) Hit save and it pops back to the ‘Normal’ view.
Ok that’s enough.

All in all I think Nvu is a great start and can be good for beginners. I hope they keep working on this project as it’s a good start, just needs some more work. For Nvu 1.0 I rate it a B. It’s nice, works on multiple platforms, plays well with Firefox and Thunderbird and does create good HTML.

Oh and incase you were wondering, Thunderbird is the email client from the Mozilla Suite and Firefox is the browser. Both Thunderbird and Firefox were created by the official Mozilla team.