Review: Quanta Plus

by ComputerBob

September 13, 2006

Last Updated November 9, 2007

It's been more than a month and a half since I switched my main PC from Windows to Linux, and I haven't looked back. In all this time, the only Windows application that I've missed was Macromedia Dreamweaver 4, which I used to create this site for several years before switching to Linux. Several weeks ago, after researching the most popular free, open source choices, including Bluefish, Quanta Plus, Screem, and NVU, I decided that Quanta Plus would probably suit my needs the best. The main things that attracted me to it were the fact that every review of it said that one of its many, many features was "powerful project management." I hoped that meant that Quanta Plus would be able to do "intelligent uploads" like Dreamweaver — letting me edit as many local files as I wanted, and then automatically uploading to my web server only those files that I had changed. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any review or site that actually described Quanta Plus' project management features, so I downloaded and installed it to check it out for myself. Though I tried and tried, I couldn't figure out how to get Quanta Plus to consider my local copy of this entire site to be "a project." That's why, for the past several weeks, I've been going through the hassle of using a simple text editor and separate FTP software to update this site in Linux.

Fast-forward to two days ago, when I found the two "Linux and Web Development" articles that I mentioned yesterday. They had a lot of good things to say about Quanta Plus. Motivated by what I had read, I did some more searching and found Taking the Quanta Leap, which gave a few more details about its project management capabilities. A little while later, I found The Quanta Plus User Manual, which contained a lot of good information, including Working With Projects, which told me how to properly configure this site as a Quanta project. Then I found The Multi-Document Interface, which explained the basics of Quanta's various editing views. Armed with all of that knowledge, I successfully set up my local copy of this site as a Quanta project.

Once I got that done, Quanta's interface was very intuitive to me. It took me less than 30 minutes to become familiar enough with it to use it to update this Journal entry. It lets me open multiple documents, each in its own tab, to make it easy to cut and paste between them. When I finish editing, I can right-click on any individual tab and tell Quanta to upload that file to my web server, or I can go the the Project menu and tell Quanta to automatically upload all of the files that I've changed. Those are exactly the project management features that I had hoped Quanta would have.

Interestingly, while looking for a way to insert an em tag to emphasize a word, I discovered that the tooltip for the Quanta editor's I button (to turn on italics, AKA emphasis) said that it was going to insert a strong tag, instead of the proper em tag. Likewise, the tooltip for the Quanta editor's B button (to turn on boldface) said that it was going to insert an em tag, instead of the proper strong tag. In other words, those two buttons' tooltips were switched. I searched for a solution to the problem for about 25 minutes, but couldn't find any reference to it, let alone a solution to it. Then, out of curiosity, I right-clicked the B button and discovered the option to edit it. A few seconds later, I had edited the B and I buttons' tooltips to correctly indicate the codes that they insert. While I'm disappointed that they were incorrect "out of the box," I'm extremely impressed by how easy it was to correct them.

I highly recommend Quanta Plus as a Linux web development tool. What makes me want to do that after using it for only 4 or 5 hours? Because, now that I'm using Quanta Plus, I no longer miss Dreamweaver.

UPDATE — January 23, 2007: Like Dreamweaver, Quanta Plus also lets you create and use templates. Here's the first paragraph of the Quanta Plus User Manual's "Templates" section: "Templates are basically skeleton documents, code snippets and files to link to. Quanta Plus uses templates fundamentally as a standard file system with enhanced organization and interfacing. You can copy, move or link any repository currently on your system into the templates tree. Think of Quanta Plus templates as having roughly the limitations to your imagination that your file system has."

UPDATE — November 9, 2007: It's been almost 14 months since I first wrote this review, but I'm still happily using Quanta Plus for all of my web development work.