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Is Quanta for me?
by Chakie on Tuesday 09/Mar/2004, @23:43
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I've been wanting to try out Quanta for a while, but never got to it. Me and my wife have a smallish personal site with mainly a calendar of events and a lot of digital images in various slideshows. It's all done in quite simple PHP with most of formatting done using stylesheets. The stuff is uploaded to a remote webserver using scp (or alternatively checked into CVS and checked out at the remote webserver).
Would Quanta bring us any benefits over using Emacs? Could I import the existing project and just start creating new stuff? I'm not normally too much into IDE:s and stuff like that, but Quanta does sound nice, especially for one not too used to web development. |
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Re: Is Quanta for me?
by Mathieu Kooiman on Wednesday 10/Mar/2004, @00:17
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You work with PHP, CVS and mostly stylesheets. Quanta would bring you :
o) the ability to use Cervisia ( KDE's graphical CVS client) from your editor.
o) PHP support. Think PHP function autocompletion, highlighting and a structure overview
o) A powerfull CSS editor (which *does* require some time to get used to, if you ask me :) ).
o) Funky table editor
o) A project manager (so, yes, you could basically import it and move right along)
o) Templating capabilities.
o) Since Quanta builds on KDE, it has access to the KIOSlaves on your system. So by definition you can open files, or even maintain projects via FTP,FISH (that's like SCP), SMB and others.
It's probably not for everyone, but it's sure worth a try. I've moved from vim to quanta for my web work. I still use vim, when I have to edit something like a configuration file or just need an editor on the console. But for me, Quanta has added enough to use it for web work. I do miss vim keybindings though :).
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Re: Is Quanta for me?
by PaulSeamons on Wednesday 10/Mar/2004, @10:35
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Emacs doesn't quite nail that list down - but it gets the main ones.
> the ability to use Cervisia (CVS) from your editor
Emacs has built in vc (version control) mode which works very well with CVS (and I would be suprised if it worked with subversion). The key bindings are very easy to use once they are known (discovering them is always the fun/hard part in emacs). I do like Cervisia when I am working on the cvs tree in multiple directories - but I can also do this in vc-dired mode (version control directory edit).
> PHP support.
Emacs and vim would give you plenty of syntax highlighting, and if ctags supports it, you would get the autocompletion as well. Haven't seen about the structure overview though - sounds very nice.
> KIOSlaves
Hmmmm - this one is harder to match. KIOSlaves are very cool. Emacs does have built in ftp mode (edit files, manage directories on remote servers). Samba in the past has been done on a fileside mount point. SCP - I haven't seen that built into emacs yet. Well - I guess this is a mute point all now because of the FuseIO framework which lets commandline programs access
> Everything else
Yeah - Emacs doesn't have much template support, or a table editor, or a project manager or a css editor. So these could make life nice. And Emacs definately won't do WYSIWYG.
Seems to be that it depends upon your needs. There are definite advantages to Quanta. But it may take awhile (if ever) for some old commandline people to make the switch. I still know plenty of people who use WordPerfect 5.1 and are faster at it and more productive (in writting simple documents and books at least) than anybody else that I've met using another word processor.
Of course - the commandline people equal about 1% of the enduser population (sorry for the obvious unsubstantiated statistic).
Paul
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Re: Is Quanta for me?
by PaulSeamons on Wednesday 10/Mar/2004, @10:52
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Of course - if you read at all about the huge, lengthy list of the amazing things that Quanta can do - then the reasons to switch from emacs to Quanta really start to make the decision easy.
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Re: Is Quanta for me?
by Eric Laffoon on Wednesday 10/Mar/2004, @15:01
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> Seems to be that it depends upon your needs. There are definite advantages to Quanta. But it may take awhile (if ever) for some old commandline people to make the switch.
Wow, CLI? Guess what? There is an old saying, "The pen is mightier than the sword" but an old samauri saying paraphrased "pen and sword in accord". In the windows world GUI is king and every operation is a click away. As you no doubt know this is a recipe to drive you insane many times where repetitive tasks demand the "sword" of the CLI to cut quickly through those operations. This doesn't mean that the GUI is in any way bad. It means that GUI and CLI both have strengths and weaknesses. The ideal application "thinks" and acts like a hybrid, getting out of the way and offering up the CLI for the tasks that it makes sense for and pulling the strengths of the GUI where it makes sense. The key is exposing strengths and augmenting weaknesses accordingly.
Quanta offers the user programmable user actions that can execute scripts using any language that runs in the shell. These can operate on selected text, editor content or no input and can output to replace the editor content, selected text or place it at the cursor position... even no output or make a new file. Add to this the fact that we're making sure everything inside is exposed via DCOP and you can script using your current file or project directory... we even have Kommander to build dialogs that add scripting. You could quite literraly open Quanta on one desktop, go to another and begin composing documents and performing various tasks in Quanta from konsole. ;-)
Quanta is not at all about being a superior application because the GUI is king. It is about being a GUI application that is superior because it pays much more than a passing homage to CLI and offers the developer an easy integration of the best of these two technologies.
Why would anyone seriously choose to not be able to choose between them where their strengths serve their needs? ;-)
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Re: Is Quanta for me?
by Eric Laffoon on Wednesday 10/Mar/2004, @14:44
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I thank Mathieu for his presentation here. It's a good picture. I think the thing to remember is the focus and background of each. Emacs is very mature and tremendously powerful software. At the same time it has expanded along various paths, not been really specific to the task of web work (actually started prior to public web interfaces) and can be somewhat maddening to learn. I decided to look elsewhere because I knew it would not deal with some aspects of what I wanted with specificity and that I would always be slapping my forehead over finding something else it would do better that was lost in the myriad of things it's strapped on over 20+ major revisions.
Quanta was designed specifically for me to address what I needed to do to get my work done as a professional web developer and now what I need to do work on my personal sites. There has been a lot of good input from others for related tasks. In all cases the assumption is that I don't know everything and never will but Quanta will help me look as if I do. Software should naturally extend your efforts, enable you to achieve specific tasks with loose general knowledge and help you to better master your tasks by exposing you to usefull information that expands your essential knowledge, without creating a burden in the process. This is because we don't want to read the book before taking step one.
So to expound on Mathieu's points...
> o) PHP support. Think PHP function autocompletion, highlighting and a structure overview
This includes a structure tree that is much like a DOM tree for HTML. However you can right click and show PHP groups which will show classes, objects, functions and variables. It will also show these within linked files and enable you to open them as well as use their functions and variables in auto completion. Frankly auto completion is worthless to me if I can't modularize my design and am forced to build hideous monolithic disaster zones copying functions all over and editing them. Auto completion also respects variable scope. Inside or outside a function you see what you're supposed to see. The groups in the tree enable an overview. More functionality is on the way.
> o) A powerfull CSS editor (which *does* require some time to get used to, if you ask me :) ).
Review the interview section on CSS now that it's edited. I know why Mathieu thinks it takes getting used to and on the same issue I grasped it instantly. It may not have been Vim like enough for him. ;-)
> o) Funky table editor
Funky because Mathieu is our "ultimate tester" and found that it chokes on bad HTML as did I. However it will allow you to recursively edit sub tables and add rows and columns anywhere in the table so it is a very cool improvement. It's currently being worked on to improve it and make it less sensitive to editing broken content.
> o) A project manager (so, yes, you could basically import it and move right along)
The project manager will allow you to edit numerous files and hit upload and verify which files, but it will present only those changed since last upload. Quanta also has preview for HTML but using the project facilities it is possible to preview at an http address. I use this by placing my project in my server path and this means I can edit and live preview PHP/Mysql pages in Quanta. (I did just find a bug where the cached version continues to show and I'm not sure how long this has been an issue but it's fixed in CVS.)
> o) Templating capabilities.
Files and code snippets. It does linked templates too but we need to modify the upload process to include linked templates.
> o) Since Quanta builds on KDE, it has access to the KIOSlaves on your system.
The fish protocol is ssh/scp. You can also add "top directories" to the files tree which means that you can view and work with any of your sites from this tree. You can also open your project remote if you choose to create a remote project and specify the kio slave to use. You can open and save files via kio to anywhere as well as specify the protocol for upload. Quanta also allows you to store your password for convenience if you system is secure.
What Mathieu didn't mention was some of our support applications like KFileReplace, KImageMapEditor (CVS version), and Kommander which enable you to visually create dialogs for custom functionality. There's a lot to like.
> It's probably not for everyone, but it's sure worth a try.
While we focus on serious developers we try to accommodate all experience levels by making docs available which provide context sensitive help. These include HTML, PHP, CSS, Javascript and MySql. We will continue to work on diverse user support.
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