How do you get the best web design and development environment to work with? Well this very much depends on you. Having tried many different combinations, and still trying more, I come to the concussion that the best system for me is to use a Linux Ubuntu based system with LAMP installed. Ubuntu is far more reliable than windows will ever be, thus I have peace of mind that my laptop won’t crash just after I’ve programmed my way through I problem and just before I click save, or because I click save!
There are then so many more choices to make, which text editor to use, or image editor, or do you plump for a full on IDE.
I have found the ideal editor for myself is Bluefish. From their own website “Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdevelopers, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages. Bluefish is an open source development project, released under the GNU GPL licence. Bluefish is a multi-platform application that runs on most desktop operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS-X, Windows, OpenBSD and Solaris.”
I find it has all the features i need;
- Code block folding
- Highlighting matching block start and end markers (both brackets and tags)
- Auto-completion and auto-tag-closing for many programming languages, with reference information, and even for nested languages (e.g. css and javascript inside html code that is inside a php document)
with included language definition files for all the languages I use:- CSS
- HTML, XHTML and HTML5
- JavaScript and jQuery
- PHP
- SQL
- WordPress
- XML
Yes this is a very useful tool.
Next we need something to create the images we need. This is were I cheat a bit, I get my wife to do most of the graphic design I require. She uses Coral Draw 12 to do all her work, and she is very anti photoshop (sorry fans). However when I do need to do any image work I use GIMP, but recently I have discovered Xara Xtreme which looks promising.
The last tool I need is a good, reliable web browser. I HATE IE. There I’ve said it, and it feels good to get that off my chest. So I use Google Chrome mostly and also Firefox a bit for testing, both far more reliable and faster and uncluttered than anything Microsoft could produce.
So my top tips for the best web design and development environment are;
Use Ubuntu and LAMP, Bluefish and Xara Xtreme. And they are all FREE FREE FREE