13 Excellent Open Source Tools for Web Designers
Open source applications and tools are a great alternative for web designers on a budget. Many open source tools have comparable features to the expensive applications, and are also free. This makes it possible possible for a web designer to have all the tools and applications needed to complete everyday tasks without even spending a cent. In this article you will find 13 of the best open source tools for web designers.
Text Editors
Aptana Studio
Aptana is a complete web development environment that combines powerful authoring tools for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, along with thousands of additional plugins created by the community.
KompoZer
KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing.
Notepad++
Notepad++ is a source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. It runs on Windows and is governed by a GPL License.
Firebug
Firebug is a plugin for Firefox that allows you to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
Quanta Plus
Quanta Plus is a highly stable and feature rich web development environment.
jEdit
jEdit is a cross platform text editor with hundreds of person-years of development behind it.
Graphics Applications
GIMP
GIMP is a versatile graphics manipulation package. It’s considered by many to be an excellent alternative to Photoshop.
Dia
Dia is a cross operating system diagram creation application.
Krita
Krita is a graphics application for everyone who wants to get creative with images.
Inkscape
Inkscape is a vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Adobe Illustrator.
FTP
FileZilla
FileZilla is probably the most popular ftp application. You can download a client or server version.
Cyberduck
Cyberduck is an FTP client built for the Mac.
WinSCP
WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client and FTP client for Windows.
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Oct 12, 2009
Great selection of tools, also smart move to put some extra stuff at the bottom!
Greetz
Oct 12, 2009
Good collection of software. I think you have missed some software. http://www.myhtmlworld.com/web-development/free-tools-to-develop-website.html
Oct 12, 2009
Nothing new. Sorry.
Oct 12, 2009
thanks you
nice open source
Oct 12, 2009
Hello Henry!
Very nice article. Thanks for providing lot of information about this applications.
Oct 12, 2009
well done , cool tools for webdesign prof.
—————stooni
Oct 12, 2009
I use Gimp frequently. I haven’t installed any commercial alternative on my workstation in years.
I use Dia regularly. I tried to use Visio on a Windows machine recently for a project. I ended up just downloading Dia to the machine. It does what I needed it to do fairly well. A slightly more “brisk” interface would be nice.
Filezilla is powerful, but the UI is just a train wreck. I still use it most of the time as it’s one of the few FTP apps that properly supports umasks.
I use netbeans over Aptana because I ran into issues with Git support in Aptana. Netbeans is OSS and a very good IDE.
Speaking of, Git and SVN can be a Web developers best friend… would be nice additions to the list.
Oh, and then there’s Firefox and the many plugins, of course.
Oct 12, 2009
I recommend Eclipse. A great open source IDE!
Oct 12, 2009
Some nice links to investigate, I would certainly be lost without filezilla
Oct 12, 2009
Thank you so much for the tools but I think there are more software available.
Oct 13, 2009
You wanna talk about lifesavers, firebug is #1. The DOM options plus the xpath ability is key for any person in our industry
Oct 13, 2009
Great list… Aptana, Firebug and GIMP are my favorites…thanks…
you forgot FireFTP…
Oct 13, 2009
Great list of resources. I’ll be sure to start passing these along.
Oct 14, 2009
Aptana and notepad++ very powerful and productive .Thx
Oct 20, 2009
I’ve heard a lot of positive reviews about notepad++
Dec 3, 2009
Thanks for these links, I didn’t know Aptana Studio, and it seems to be an excellent tool!
Dec 8, 2009
Thanks for sharing this article..
Dec 19, 2009
I think Selenium web site testing framework should among the first 3 in this least, here is a short introductory article – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0499549/