What Nvu was
Nvu was a WYSIWYG web editor: you laid out a page the way it would look in a browser, and Nvu wrote the HTML for you.
Linspire, Inc. launched the open source project to make it easy to create web pages on desktop Linux. Daniel Glazman of Disruptive Innovations, formerly the chief architect of Mozilla Composer, served as its lead developer. Nvu was based on Mozilla Composer code and used Gecko, the same layout engine used by Mozilla Firefox.
Builds were available for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and FreeBSD, and the code was released under the MPL, LGPL and GPL tri-license. Nvu 1.0 was released on June 28, 2005.
What you could do with it
The original features page describes what Nvu added to the old Composer:
- A site manager that displayed the files on your web server in a sidebar, either as a tree or a single folder.
- Tabs let you edit multiple pages in one window, with a separate undo history for each.
- A built-in CSS editor, CaScadeS, for creating stylesheets and viewing the applied styles as you worked.
- Form editing, a new color picker and customizable toolbars.
- Cleaner markup, with access to the W3C HTML validator from within the editor.
- Table resizing rulers and a spellchecker that marked errors with underlines as you typed.
What happened to Nvu
Nvu 1.0 was the final official release. A community fork called KompoZer, led by Fabien Cazenave, continued fixing bugs through 2010. Daniel Glazman later developed BlueGriffon, a new WYSIWYG editor based on Gecko. The Nvu article on Wikipedia gives more detail about the project's history.
This address now features nvudev, a guide to creating websites without code. It follows the idea behind Nvu: anyone should be able to publish a good page without learning HTML.
What is in the archive
The original pages remain as published from 2005 to 2007, at their former addresses. Statements about versions, plans and support reflect that period.
- The Nvu homepage, which links to every page below.
- Downloads: installers and packages for Nvu 1.0 on Linux, Windows, Mac and FreeBSD. Some files were not archived and are no longer available.
- The Nvu User Guide by Charles Cooke, organized by chapter.
- Features and screenshots.
- The FAQ, support and mailing lists.
- Developer pages, with information on building Nvu from source and licensing.
- The complete site map for the old site.
Should you still use Nvu?
Consider the downloads historical, not useful tools. Nvu has not been updated since its 1.0 release in 2005, so it came before HTML5 and modern CSS, and old installers like these should not be on a computer you depend on.
For a visual editor today, see our guide to WYSIWYG HTML editors for the options available now. If you just want to get a site online, a website builder is most like what Nvu aimed to offer.