Nvu Editor's Review

Nvu is an Open Source Web design tool.

It is an application that was originally released by Linspire Inc., the corporation that is the producer of the commercial Linux distribution, called Linspire. Nvu is now a community supported project.

This is a Web design tool released as a competitor for the well known commercial tools such as Macromedia Dreamweaver (currently Adobe) and Microsoft FrontPage. You can design your own page with this tool as simple as writing a document because it has built in a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get).

You can add all kinds of HTML elements directly from the WYSIWYG editor very easily. The text formatting works seamlessly like in a word processor engine as part of an office suite.

The interface supports tabbed editing in order to work with multiple pages. You can have the possibility to see the Web page as HTML tags, as HTML code, or as the preview mode.

I liked the fact that the application isn't limited to HTML only. You can add pretty easily PHP code and it has a built in CSS editor. You can even set the application to use CSS attributes, when possible, instead of HTML ones.

If you want to publish your page you can do this pretty quickly with the built in FTP client. It is not a fully featured FTP client, you can only upload, but it is enough for a quick publishing task. For advanced uploads is recommended a stand-alone FTP client.

The application is covered under the MPL (Mozilla Public License)/GPL (GNU General Public License)/LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) tri-license and is completely Open Source. In fact the whole program is running based on a Mozilla engine. This means a strong compatibility with all the Mozilla based browsers.

Pluses: it is a strong, free Web design tool. It has a lot of features that can help you to design HTML pages. It includes the support for PHP and CSS code.

Drawbacks / flaws: the applications is loaded very slow.

In conclusion: it doesn't have so many features such as the commercial applications but since is free you can use it for your work without paying a thing.

version reviewed: 1.0