On Tue, 19 Jun 2007, Sam Martin wrote:

> On 6/19/07, Donovan Niesen wrote:
>> I do a significant amount of work in with HTML, CSS and PHP/MySQL.
>> Most of my time is spent inside Dreamweaver on my Windows partition.
>> While Dreamweaver has been good to me, I would like to see what others
>> are using on a daily basis in Linux.  Is there anything with some of
>> the handier features in Dreamweaver (uploading pages to remote/testing
>> sites, MySQL integration)?
>
> I've used the following more or less regularly:
>
> 1) vim + GNU screen + ssh
> Keep a mysql console in one screen window, and a vim session in
> another.  *Almost* like an IDE, and there's no need to upload when you
> make changes (assuming you have ssh access).


I've been getting into emacs.  It is a vast world but one worth mastering. 
I've used it for a decade or more, but not very seriously.  Now that I am 
studying it more and using some of the add-ons, I see that it provides 
beautiful syntax highlighting and lots of nice features for HTML/XML 
editing (e.g., nXhtml mode).  The newest version (22.1, which just came 
out on June 8) includes something called TRAMP for remotely editing files:

http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/

Looks pretty sweet.  We are starting a Ruby on Rails (RoR) project and 
there are really nice modes for RoR/Ruby editing in emacs.  Lots of RoR 
developers use TextMate on Macs, but that is not portable to other OSs, it 
is proprietary and it has nothing like the flexibility of emacs.  I don't 
think TextMate is a good choice for me for those reasons.

The emacs keystrokes are used in many, many programs (e.g., bash shell) 
because of the readline library.  I just started using XKeymacs on Windows 
to get the emacs keystrokes in Windows apps, and so far it has been 
excellent:

http://www.cam.hi-ho.ne.jp/oishi/indexen.html

Another reason I'm using emacs more is that I want to get into using ESS 
(Emacs Speaks Statistics) with R for statistical analysis and I want to do 
my writing in LaTeX or TeX.  Emacs will be great for this work.

http://ess.r-project.org/
http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/

Of course, I am not saying that Emacs is better than something else, but 
I've been studying this a little here and there for many years and I 
really don't think that even the best alternatives (e.g., vim) can outdo 
emacs for a productive editing/working environment.  That's why I have 
decided after these many years of contemplating the issues to put much 
more effort into studying emacs and its add-on modes.

Mike