One of my readers found the recommendation of nVu to be of some concern, as he'd used nVu and had had some serious problems. Here's his review of nVu.
nVu Review by "Bathrobe"
I had occasion to use Nvu recently, working on an established Web site. I soon found some major issues. This is what I experienced:
- It failed to notice code. Yes, that's right, it failed to show up code that was actually in there. Someone pointed out a few redundant tags in my code, and I was puzzled because I couldn't see them when I opened the source in Nvu (the tag in question was a closing <sup> tag that I'd failed to delete). I've come across further examples since. It seems that Nvu deals with anomalous code by ignoring it.
- I haven't been able to do a find-and-replace outside a single document. What happens when you need to do a whole site? Dreamweaver allows you to replace in multiple documents and so does skEdit (which is a code editor, not WYSIWYG) -- but not Nvu. This is a real problem if you have 100 pages that need find-and-replace to be done on a particular piece of code.
- It reformatted my source code without asking. The compact lines of code that went in came out with lots of useless blank lines. The most serious problem was the fact that it put line breaks in the middle of Chinese and Japanese words, which appeared in the browser as spaces in the middle of words. I had to go through and remove them by hand.
- It seems to have inserted code without asking. After working on opened documents, I found the <tbody> tag in tables. When I tried to remove them with a straightforward find-and-replace, the page failed to render! The result was more hand-tinkering with the code.
These faults are enough to make me wary of opening any pages in nVu. The way it interferes with document code and fails to recognise tags make it dangerous to use. I would be very careful about recommending this software to anyone, free or not.
