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I’ve recently made a shift from Windows to Ubuntu and one of the software that I’m really missing is Adobe Dreamweaver. Wine doesn’t give as good an experience.

Which WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor is suited for Ubuntu (or for any other Linux distribution in general)?

Git integration would be a bonus.

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15

KompoZer screenshots show it as a real WYSIWYG editor, and it is available for Linux, OS X and Windows:

KompoZer
Screenshot (source: KompoZer homepage; click for full-size)

KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing.
KompoZer is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.

To install KompoZer on Ubuntu 12.10 and up follow these instructions.

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    Do you have any experience with KompoZer? – Bernhard Feb 5 '14 at 16:00
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    No; I'm usually editing my code with a "plain text editor". – Izzy♦ Feb 5 '14 at 16:09
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    one thing to say, KompoZer is dead(last stable version was in 2007, developer version 2010) but I don't know a better one anyway – niceman Apr 4 '15 at 16:56
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Update (20170929): For the last year I am using the amazing Pinegrow (https://pinegrow.com) IDE and I wholeheartedly recommend it. The BlueGriffon I mentioned below in my reply from few years ago is outdated and far behind the Pinegrow in development.

I recommend BlueGriffon. It is FREE, feature rich, runs on all major platforms, and has many good add-ons, some of them commercial. I have the (commercial) CSS plug-in, and I am very happy with it. I have used KompoZer before I found BlueGriffon. I humbly believe Amaya can't compete with these two.

A good alternative is Eclipse with some WYSIWYG plugin, like, for an example, the "JavaServer Faces(JSF) Tools Project" which is part of the "Eclipse Webtools".

BlueGriffon UI

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    Sadly BlueGriffon is not stable: as soon as I click on some parts of the control bar with my mouse, it exists with a segmentation fault. – Xi'an Apr 27 '15 at 8:58
  • Also sadly, Blue Griffon is not open source nor is it free. Oh, one can download an executable and the source is available. But it's been gimped of any useful functionality. One has to buy closed source plugins to make the program functional. Additionally, it appears that he's abandoned 32 bit Ubuntu users. I have business reasons for keeping my company at 12.04LTS as long as possible so we're out in the cold. Finally, Mozilla's abandoning the XUL API means this program, along with all others that use the XUL API will die. Not a product to waste your time on. John – user1908895 Jan 1 '16 at 19:42
  • I needed to do a quick and dirty html page edit, and the binary that I downloaded from the BlueGriffon site worked for me (Debian jessie). However, it is not available in Debian/Ubuntu, though there is an Arch listing at archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/bluegriffon. Unfortunately there don't appear to be viable alternatives in Debian. At least I did not find anything. – Faheem Mitha Mar 12 '16 at 2:51
  • I really like Bluegriffon overall, but I've been maintaining a site built with SSI pages (shtml files), and the tool simply can't load the pages. – Steve Gelman Jan 1 '17 at 17:09
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    Pinegrow is not opensource or free. The free trial is only 7 days. – Dorian Mar 24 '18 at 18:51
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Update

This answer is no longer valid. As notified in comment by @Dorian, this can no more be used for normal web development.

Google Web Designer is a WYSIWYG html editor and much more. enter image description here

The design is currently in beta and is available for the following Linux distributions:

  • Ubuntu
  • Debian
  • OpenSuSE
  • Fedora

Here's the official download link

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  • The current version of Google Web Designer is only for creating ads on a website. It's not for creating an entire site. – Dorian Mar 27 '18 at 19:36
  • @Dorian - Yes you are right. They have changed since the beta release. I updated the answer – bhaskarc Mar 28 '18 at 4:26
  • Google Chrome Webdesigner can only work with html-pages that are also created with the application, you can't edit any html document. – Gerbrand Aug 1 '18 at 10:26
  • It looks like it's setup to edit ads. – Elliptical view Jun 28 at 23:42
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Amaya is W3C's official WYSIWYG Web editor. It is open source, and judging by the screenshots, customizable enough. Just in case, it also supports OSX and Windows.

Amaya UI

On the home page, it is described thus:

Amaya is a Web editor, i.e. a tool used to create and update documents directly on the Web. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. This follows the original vision of the Web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium.

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  • Just tried to install it on Debian 7.9 (wheezy) to no avail (unmet dependency to an older ssl library). Building from source also fails (OpenGL cannot be detected by configure). It looks like to be pretty unmaintained. – a1an Feb 24 '16 at 13:43
  • @a1an I haven't actually used it, so I don't really know. To be honest, I'd probably just use Kompozer if I were you :P – MadTux Feb 24 '16 at 17:31
  • It says supports html4 (only). It's not quite old. Thanks, might still be good for some things. – Elliptical view Jun 28 at 23:18
0

LibreOffice writer (LO Writer) can take up some of the slack. It may or may not meet your needs. It's no dreamweaver, but it can produce html.

For example it can edit the GNU Info html pages, so that I can add my own notes and comments or highlighting into these pages as I read them.

Pay attention to paragraph styles, as you'll probably have to re-style your page using LibreOffice styling settings (they call it 'Formatting'). You format different styles.

enter image description here

(What I did here, was just browsed to the page on the internet, then saved it to a *.html file, then opened it in LibreOffice.)

TIP: turn the navigator on (Menu | View | Navigator or F5) to be able to jump around in pages using internal links and anchors, including backup to prior anchors.

screen shot

Manual for v6 in pdf

The best place for help with LO is at ask.libreoffice.org.

Also if you haven't already got LibreOffice installed, its your go to source for spreadsheets, and database frontends too.

Keep in mind that modern html5 with css and javascript is a very complex thing in the end. This is probably why most of the html editors come at some cost. My advise is to start simple, and work up to more complex things as you go.

(BTW, I too have moved from Windows to GNU/Linux, and am glad of my move, but it has been a challenge with some things, and a steep learning curve with others, but really wonderful for shell scripting and versatility!

I also have used better editors in Windows both html, text, and CAD that I dearly miss. Today I keep a dual boot system to allow me to get at some of the old tools as I transition.

Little by little I've learned to work with what gives, and try to improve what needs some love. I've found that lots of great stuff does work w/ Linux. Glad to hear of others also switching.)

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