Vormplus Webtools is Going Open Source

When I learned HTML in the late ’90s, there wasn’t much wysiwyg webdesign software around. Ok, there was Macromedia Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage, but both produced ugly code so it was better to code everything by hand. And to this day – almost 10 years later – I still do my coding by hand. I can do it faster by hand than I would by using a wysiwyg editor. I do use the latest version of Dreamweaver now to check for browser compatibility and some other features.

Choosing the right text editor

When I started Vormplus little more than a year ago, I wanted to be more productive at coding. So I tried a few text editors to see which one was the best for me.

I played around with TextMate for a while. It’s really good, has a lot of features, but it was not the thing I needed at that moment. I’ve always been a fan of Barebones Software. BBEdit is probably the best editor there is on the Mac platform. But it’s also quite pricy for a text editor. Barebones also made TextWrangler, a really good editor for people who don’t need all the features of BBEdit. I chose TextWrangler because it’s fully scriptable with AppleScript. And it’s free.

Building the tools

And then there was me, my favorite new editor, AppleScript and a bunch of html-tags I would never type again. The first thing I needed was a script that created a new XHTML document with the right doctype, and the most basic tags I needed every time. Same thing for CSS, a document with the selectors I needed the most. And then things went out of control and I made a script for every tag and selector available. And it works fine for what it is.

Great for learning XHTML

In september last year I showed my tools to Stephan Bourdon, one of my colleagues at Hogeschool Sint-Lukas Brussel. He teaches XHTML and wanted to use TextWrangler and my webtools in his classes. So I gave him my permission to use the software. Less typo’s are being made by the students since they don’t have to type tags in TextEdit anymore.

Going Open Source

I’ve decided to give the software to a bigger audience now: the internet community. Vormplus Webtools is released under the Apache 2.0 license and is available at vorm + informatica. Have fun coding!