A friend and I tried a couple of XML editing packages for Debian Linux the other day. They ranged from the totally unusable to unusable and buggy.

Why is this?

I can live with the “buggy” part; I run Debian unstable and get my share of bugs and early alphas so it’s OK. I can wait. (Even though I do think that early alphas should at least survive through a File->New…)

But I don’t get the “unusable” part. All of the editors we tried were useless for actual editing and the user interfaces ranged from the messy and the ugly to the utterly pointless. In many cases it was even difficult to enter text; you had to bring up a dialog to do this…

So what are these editors for? Is there a use for XML that we’ve missed? Is it too much to ask for a text editor that you can actually use for editing text?

Unfortunately, then, there’s still no decent XML editor available for Linux, apart from nxml-mode for emacs that really isn’t an XML editor more than it is a kitchen sink.