Linux for Designers

It seems that Blue Griffon is on the road of a succesfull WYSIWYG editor on Linux (available for other OS too). In May they released Version 1.0 and now 1.2.1 is available.
Version 1.2.1 is a bugfix release of 1.2 which ships with a lot of new features. Besides the open source main software they developed some cheap, usefull, commercial addons too.
On my notebook i replaced now Kompozer with Blue Griffon because it's lively developed and seems much more up-to-date.

Webupd8 has an interesting article about collaborative work with gedit. At the article comments I found a link about extend these features using the Telepathy framework - really amazing for team work.
About collaboration: If you looking for a great CVS client that supports SVN and GIT, then try RabbitVCS. It ships with a gedit plugin too.
Another great addon is "Client side" for optimize/ restructure CSS and JavaScript files. This addon works great, a PPA for NodeJS can be found here.

With the release of the development snapshot of version 2.29.3 gEdit is moving forward to 2.30 which will be released in April 2010.
Ignacio Casal Quinteiro wrote a interesting post about auto completion features that will come. Jesse van den Kieboom shows in a screencast amazing features of multiediting too.
Besides that two really nice plugins, that will improve your workflow with many files, are available at the gEdit Plugins Page: Tabs Enhanced and TabSwitch. Both allowing you to configure the behavior of the file tabs like:
* using Ctrl+Tabulator key to switch through files
* Middle click on tabs for closing files
* Closing gEdit when any file tab is closed
* Do not show file tab bar when only one file is opened

UPDATE 09/12/08:
Jesse van den Kieboom wrote an interesting post about snippets handling too.

I wrote an update of my "New from Template" plugin for gEdit. It should now working with Gnome 2.26 and Ubuntu 9.04.
» Read more...

I started to maintain the External Tools Plugin Snippets Collection of gEdit at the Gnome Wiki. I added my first four snippets and more will come in the next days.

Happy coding!

UPDATE: Now 14 snippets for external tools waiting for you
Enjoy the new powerup!

I updated all my gEdit plugins to be completely localized in german or english. I added version numbers for all too, so you can easy check in the preferences which version you are using.

http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/gedit-language-reference-plugin
http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/gedit-browser-preview-plugin
http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/gedit-template-plugin

Happy coding!

At the moment i'm heavily on scripting various things and some times its needed to compare files. As a Winy i used PSPad which have an included comparsion tool. Now i'm on Linux using gEdit and i'd like to have such a nice workflow once i had using PSPad.
I found a very nice way using Meld. Meld is a graphical comparsion tool and will work very well as an external tool of gEdit:

1) Install the package "meld"
2) Start gEdit and opening the Menu "Tools > External Tools..."
3) Add a new external tool:
* Name: Compare Files
* Description: Compare then opened file with another
* Command:

#!/bin/sh 
meld $GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_DIR/$GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_NAME `zenity --file-selection --title=File for comparsion --filename=/home/` &

* Any othe roption is not interesting so press close
4) Now you have in "Tools" an menu entry "Compare Files" that will use the active document of gEdit and the other browsed file for comparsion

Happy computing

I updated my gEdit "Browser Preview" plugin, some bug fixes and feature enhancements:
* the plugin now checks first if IEs4Linux is installed, if not it tries to start the Internet Explorer 6 from the default Wine directory
* for testing webpages on the Webkit browser engine the plugin checks if Midori is installed if not it tries to run Konquerer
* if you opened a HTML document from a FTP server the "ftp://" will replaced by "http://" in the browser

Read more...

...i was very busy the last days. I had a talk at the T3AK'08 and at area42 i have to finish SweeTS 1.20. SweeTS is a development enviroment for TypoScript and a external TypoScript editor. TypoScript is the template language of the content management system (CMS) TYPO3.
Besides that i launched the tyClipse project that will bring TYPO3 and TypoScript development to Eclipse.

I updated my Language Reference plugin for gEdit again. Now it works with unsaved files too. There is a important change of naming the language reference files. Please reread the instructions.

» Read more...