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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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  • 2
    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 The BlueGriffon I mentioned below in my reply from few years ago is outdated and far behind the Pinegrow in development.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
7

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
6

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

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