What are we talking about here? What you haven’t heard? We are talking about programming, real, easy web development programming.  If you are a web developer and you are using a programming program such as Dreamweaver or the like, then you are very much missing out.

According to Quanta’s website, “Quanta Plus is a highly stable and feature rich web development environment.”  Well I consider that quite the understatment.  Mine would read this, “My Web Development Environment can kick your Web Developments Environment’s Byte.” 

Now, to be fair, not everyone knows about Quanta+, simply because it can only be found on a Linux machine.  So that limits the usage to about 10% of  you out there.  But have no fear, there are some very simple and easy ways to get it running, and you will get much more too.  My solution, I run VMWare from my Vista, I have Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon running a full LAMP server.  I have full drag ‘n drop capabilities between the operating systems, networking via bridged WAN, and I also get Quanta+ and OneNote.

However you decide to get it, this is what you will be in store for…(just a few things I take notice of all the time).

• Custom fonts and colors for all constructs of any Web Development code (that means functions look different than strings, etc.)
  • Why is this nice?  Have you ever found yourself hating a the colors of your code.  Believe it or not, this will actually affect your coding habits, and may make you a worse programmer than you ever would like to be simply because you are annoyed subconciously.
• Custom shortcuts, many defaults are amazing.
  • Need to Comment something out? CTRL-D and then entire line is set.
  •  Are you at the end of the line and you want to start a new one just the same, Hold CTRL, hit enter, and the line begins with the same character(s) the previous did, IE comment tags are repeated for you.

• Missing your closing tag?
  • You will know with Quanta, because if it didn’t put it in for you, which it does with intelligence, then your code will show up broke wherever it’s missing.  This is also customizable, which makes the feature all that more special.

• FTP, Projects, document structure, etc..
  • Yup, full support for all that.. oh and it does CVS so you really can get things rolling.
• Did I mention in the past year of using it, it has not once crashed on me?  Yes I have tried well enough.

Coding with Quanta+ makes life eaiser, it’s that simple.  What would you rather have, and $800 dollar software that really just annoys you with the way it think you should do things? Or a free solution that has proven to many it can and will set the pace for Web Development.  You choose, I know what I want…