How To Develop Websites On Linux

This article will look at tools that can help those of you who want to develop websites on a Linux platform, from powerful text editors to desktop and system features. How do you edit files remotely without FTP plug-ins? What are package managers, and why they are cool? In which Web browsers can you test your applications?

1. Tools

Below, for your quick reference, is a list of tools that we will mention or explain in this article.

Text Editors:

  • Gedit
  • Geany

Browsers:

  • Opera
  • Mozilla Firefox
  • Epiphany (with the WebKit engine)
  • Chromium (for some other WebKit examples)

General and command line tools:

  • FUSE
  • SSHFS
  • Vim
  • Parcellite

2. Gedit

Gedit is the default and simplest text editor for the GNOME environment. The default installation already comes with some good resources, although not all of them are activated by default. It is bundled with some plug-ins; however, you can add many more plug-ins to make it a nice simple IDE. If you go to Edit > Preferences > Plugins, you’ll see which plug-ins are installed by default. There, you can configure and activate them. On the same screen, you can configure other elements of the text editor, such as indentation, line numbering and current line highlighting.

Your default installation probably won’t have many plug-ins by default other than those. Check if your distro has a package to automatically install a set of plug-ins. The package would be named gedit-plugins. I recommend installing it because it adds at least five helpful plug-ins: bracket completion, color picker (quite helpful with your CSS), session saver, smart spaces and terminal. These are all of the plug-ins installed with the package:

  • Bracket completion
  • Charmap select
  • Code comment
  • Color picker
  • Join and split lines
  • Session saver
  • Smart spaces
  • Show tabbar
  • Terminal

See the plug-ins section for a fuller overview of them.

Let’s look at the most useful of these basic plug-ins for developers and see how we can configure them, in needed.

Snippets

Snippets inserts frequently used pieces of text quickly. To configure it, check it on the plug-in tab and hit “Configure Plugin.” You can edit existing snippets, add new ones, import and export snippets and create global snippets. It is also possible to add tab triggers, shortcuts and drop targets. To activate a snippet, you must be editing a file with a corresponding snippet (e.g. if it is a Python snippet, you should be editing a Python file). If it is a blank pure-text file, just change its syntax on View > Highlight Mode. Many good snippets are on the Internet; some that I use are Django and RoR snippets.

External Tools

External tools executes external commands and shell scripts. As with snippets, you can configure those that ship with the plug-in or create your own. For more complex tasks, you will need some knowledge of shell-scripting and how to use some of the shell tools. We won’t go into how to master Gedit and its amazing plug-ins (we recommend reading Gedit manuals for that), but we will give you links to some scripts that you can play with.

Modelines

If you use Vim or Emacs in your daily work, you may know what modelines are. If you wish you could import them to other text editors, modelines lets you do exactly that.

For those who aren’t familiar with them, modelines are “definitions” of tabbing, spacing, line ending, tabbing level and so on.

The basic and gedit-plugins packages are the ones I use most often. Some other functionality can be added only through third-party plug-ins, which you can find all over the Web; GNOME Live’s Gedit section is a good start. Have a look at AutoComplete, Better Python Console (the Python Console that ships with Gedit is only useful for developing gedit plug-ins), ClassBrowserPlugin and Autosave editing sessions.

Finally, you can customize the look of Gedit with color themes. Gedit comes with a few, but you can find many more.

Further Reading

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