Best 2014 code editor: Dreamweaver vs Coda 2 vs Sublime Text 2 vs Textastic vs other

Morning, I’m very happy with DW but I recently switched from PC to iMac. So if I continue to use DW I’d have to either do it while running windows on the Mac or buy a new Mac version. Neither seem all that good to me. So I’m looking at other options. What I like about DW and like to see in my next editor is “search and replace”, code completion, code suggestions, code formatting, and other DW type things I take for granit. I’m leaning towards Coda. Does Coda offer those features? Does Sublime? And new to the Mac platform is Textastic. I already have that on my ipad so that would be a win win. And it’s cheap. May just try it. Thoughts? Suggestions? Thanks!

Adding Espresso 2 to that list of vs too.

Yes Coda has those things, Sublime probably does as well but may need a few plugins to get it working that way.

With both editors i suggest downloading them and kicking the tyres a bit to see if they fit your workflow… Coda has a trial version (https://panic.com/coda/buy.html), as does Sublime (http://www.sublimetext.com/2)

Welcome to the Mac world.
A similar discussion was going on here and you may find some [more] ideas there.

Thanks. Read it all. Most of that was windows stuff though. There are a million of those threads on the web anyway. I also heavily rely on the preview in web that DW does. With out having to save the file you can just load it up. Often times much easier than loading up wamp or whatever for a quick edit.

Hey Eric,

I’ve been using Sublime Text 3 for a couple of months now since switching away from DW and I’m very happy with it.
There are a large amount of plugins available for it and the only feature I miss from DW is the WYSIWYG view (not for coding, but for example, I could use it to select an element in a HTML document and then have that element automatically highlighted in the code view).

Sublime Text 3 is free to try, so why not give it a go?

I’ve been using the Emmet add-on with Sublime of late, and it’s awesome for code completion etc. (Emmet works with quite a few code editors.) You can type out a whole document, or document fragment, with a few keystrokes.

Browsers themselves are becoming so powerful that I wonder if we will even need code editors soon. In Chrome, you can write code directly in the dev tools and save your work straight to your files—and of course see your work in the browser immediately.

Chrome, Firefox (and, I believe) Safari browsers provide this capability.
In Chrome I quite often

  1. Select an element (or area on the page)
  2. Right-click and choose “Inspect element”
  3. In the Inspector Panel, traverse the DOM and select elements which are then highlighted in the WYSIWYG view

That’s right, but this isn’t quite the same as what I am talking about.
For example, say I want to help someone on SP with a question and ask for a link to their page.
The first thing I will do is inspect the source of the page, copy the code into my editor and add a base tag pointing to their site.
This is usually enough to reproduce their problem, but more often than not there is a lot of superfluous content on the page which I want to get rid of.
Using the DW WYSIWYG view I can select multiple elements and delete them, or click back into the code view and have them all highlighted.
This is of course possible with Sublime for example, but the DW interface makes it nice and easy.

What I also miss from DW WYSIWYG editor are the little extras such as add image map, or the ability to mark a bit of text and turn it into a link (with a little file browser to specify what it should link to).

Thanks guys. I think I’m going to try Coda first. Well they all have trial versions so I will try them all. But without trying yet, Coda sounds like the closest thing to dreamweaver on the mac side. And I do like dreamweaver. However unpopular it may be amoungst the purist. You are free to hand code yet it frees your from the mundane tasks.

You can also check out PhPStorm or [URL=“http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/”]WebStorm from JetBrains. (PhpStorm includes WebStorm.) It’s a full featured IDE for both Mac and Windows.

Picnic, I am in the exact same boat as you. I just bought an iMac (LOVE it…)

I really do love the flexibility and power of DW though…like the former poster said, it is so convenient to be able to select a tag or element in design view and instantly have the relevant code highlighted in code view. And with split panes, it’s even faster. Its code editor is actually pretty decent with plenty of advanced features like code hinting, code folding, auto-complete, etc., and that find and replace function has saved me hours of time.

In the end, I’m probably going to pony up the dough and purchase DW CS6. Then there’s Photoshop…

The norm now is to pay a monthly fee for all the Adobe products. At first I hated the idea, but I’m slowly coming around. You get access to so much that it starts to seem a better deal. You even get to use Typekit.

Emmet is simply amazing. Combined with a little knowledge of the documentation, including the Emmet write up here on Sitepoint it makes html coding a breeze.

I know you can edit files within Chrome Developer Tools, but didn’t know you could save them, how is this done?

It’s been possible to do it with CSS for a while, as shown here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8SS-rUEZPg&t=8m20s

I think you can now do it with HTML and JS as well, but perhaps only in the latest Canary versions? Or perhaps it’s something you can choose to enable. I’m not quite sure where it’s at now.

EDIT: here are some docs that might help: https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/authoring-development-workflow

I am also a user of the amazing Coda on Mac. However I need to switch to PC sometimes. Having a tough time finding an IDE which can match Coda.

I know people rave about Sublime Text (and I do use it too) but FTP navigation and editing isn’t very intuitive at the moment. I like how in Coda I can just browse my web server and double click on a file and remote edit; simple.

So can anyone recommend an IDE with the following:

  • Direct file editing from remote server. And needs to be fast! I think I tried PHPbuilder before and theres always an annoying delay when saving. Don’t think it’s my internet connection.
  • Code completion for HTML, CSS and JS. So it will auto close tags, braces, speech marks etc.