While striving to become the best HTML editor, the developers of Quanta began to kick about a rather intruiging idea. “What if Quanta was a generic, extensible, markup language editor?”
Well, this is the start of the answer. No longer bound to HTML, Quanta is now well on its way to becoming DTD agnostic. Essentially, if you can define it in XML or SGML, Quanta should be able to serve as an IDE for it.
Now, that said, it must be noted that Quanta is an outgrowth of the outstanding efforts that have been put forth by the entire KDE development community. Quanta, in celebration of open source uses the model of “Why rewrite something somebody already did and maintains already?”
Quanta provides web developers with an intuitive and powerful multiple document interface MDI that can dramatically increase your effectiveness as a web developer. Through the use of custom actions, scripting and toolbar creation you can automate almost any task. With the use of Kaptain, you can extend Quanta, so that you never have to remember scripting command syntax again (More on that in the Advanced Features section.).
Quanta divides workspace files into three areas; Global, Local and Project. These distinctions affect the scope or visibility of the various components in the Quanta IDE.
Global items are available to anyone who uses Quanta. From toolbars to actions, everything marked as global is stored in the common Quanta directory structure. This has the effect of allowing a group of admins to save certain toolbars, actions and templates in the global tree that can then be used to keep a multi-user installation of Quanta common to everyone on the system.
Local items are items that are part of an individual users collection of resources. These are stored in the individual users home directory tree as part of the kde environment information. This exposes all of the items stored as Local for use in any editing that the individual user wishes to work on. This allows you to save your most useful templates and toolbars into your home directory and use them on any documents.
Project items are those items that are of use only to a particular project. These could be anything from a CSS template to a toolbar with a custom action that performs a special magic trick on this project's files. Simply put, this is the most limited scope. All of the items saved in the project workspace be saved in the project's directory tree.