A well-known fact about the history of the microcomputer is that it took a “killer application” to make it worth buying a PC: something so useful that it justified the cost of the computer. Back in the early 1980s, that killer app was Visicalc, the first-ever spreadsheet application, which had Apple II computers pouring off the shelves, snapped up by eager accountants.

In a similar way, my Xandros PC sat on the spare desk, providing a development web server and little else, until I found my very own killer app which justified moving that PC onto my desk and dumping the Windows PC on the spare one. The application that did this for me was Quanta Plus — a web editor.

A web editor? But there are dozens of great web editors for Windows! Surely you don’t need Linux just to run an editor? Well, it’s not quite as simple as that. I spend nearly all my working hours editing program code in a text editor — no fancy WYSIWYG tools for me. Since 1993 and Windows 3.1, that editor has been TextPad, which had got welded into the core of my being. I tried other, allegedly superior text editors from time to time but somehow I just couldn’t get along with them and always found myself back with simple, reliable, uncluttered TextPad. It wasn’t perfect, further development seemed to have ground to a halt, but I knew every quirk and feature and it was tuned for just one job — editing text files quickly and efficiently. In fact it was one reason the Linux box was still on the spare desk — I tried half a dozen Linux editors and didn’t like any of them.

Then in October a student on an Open University course I teach said that he couldn’t imagine creating web pages without Quanta. Out of curiosity I visited the site and thought it was worth a try.

I was just starting work on a large PHP website, so it seemed sensible to try Quanta for this. I started it up, had a quick scan through the help files, and set up my first project. Two hours later I was completely hooked. It was one of those rare occasions when you find an application that thinks exactly the way you do. It was the “tipping point” … and within days the Linux box was on my desk with Windows relegated to the outer darkness.

It is interesting to see how something you never knew you needed can prove itself indispensable!