I’m comparing two commercial HTML/CSS editors, one of them being TopStyle, my only beef is the cost ($80 US) and the other being RapidCSS ($30 US). I don’t want to pay a lot for a XHTML / CSS editor.
I would like it to be known that I do understand what the purpose of these programs are, and some can code straight using a simple text editor. What have I been using thus far ? A very little bit of Dreamweaver which I’m going to drop and mostly TopStyle (free version)
I would like to know what you think of these two and if you have any open source / freeware alternatives in which I would spend no money
Try as I might, I can think of no sane reason to consider a commercial $$ editor for web development. There are all too many superior editors available for free as in beer.
Forget any kind of mouse/pointer based editor. Every time your hand and eyes have to focus on the mouse, your attention is broken, and productivity suffers. Learn to use a keyboard oriented editor like Vi or Emacs. You’ll never regret it.
Tommy loves Vi, but I found it to have a steep learning curve. If you’re serious about implementing a new tool, from what I’ve heard, Vi is a tremendous program once you’ve figured it out.
I tried Simple CSS very briefly, and found it worthless. I’d as soon code in Notepad++. But it’s possible I didn’t give it enough of a trial.
It’s a little more then RapidCSS but still cheaper the TopStyle, I must have overlooked it when on the site. I do like the software this company produces, it’s pretty good. Any other suggestions ?
The best online free development code editor I’ve found the best has to be Notepad++. I found it very stable, quick, very small filesize. (Hardrive space)
DW is a very expensive editor, especially if you consider all the powerful text editors that cost nothing. Even if you include its site management tools, they are all available elsewhere at no charge. I’ll talk about that below.
Beer ??? I searched never found a editor called Beer ? And Vi is that only for Mac ? I’ve ruled out Simple CSS out of the circle.
There are two types of free. Free as in speech applied to software means you are free to do with it what you wish. Free as in beer means it doesn’t cost you money.
Emacs, my favorite, is an extremely powerful text editor. It is available for more platforms than you knew existed. I won’t even try to tell you what all you can do with Emacs. Instead, take a look at this guided tour of Emacs capabilities. By comparison to the robust power of Emacs, editors like Notepad++ are tubercular three year olds.
Don’t be put off or intimidated by Vi’s and Emacs’s power and learning curves. You only need to learn the little bit you’re using. Before very long, you’ll be taking more and more advantage of the power and productivity at your finger tips.
Tommy loves Vi, but I found it to have a steep learning curve. If you’re serious about implementing a new tool, from what I’ve heard, Vi is a tremendous program once you’ve figured it out.
However, you can “get by” with a small number of commands. I did it for years : ) What worked for me was making a cheat sheet on paper and after a few days of using it, I could go make another one for some other commands, and keep doing that. Mostly needed that for tabs, diffing and named buffers.
I’ve found working with browsers and other desktop applications, I needed gvim (graphical vim) so the copy-pasta works (plus I still can’t get non-ascii characters in my terminal no matter what I do with my locale : ( AND I can only haz the colours I rilly rilly want in the graphical version… “greenvision” yay).
This oughtta help anyone choose an editor based on learning curve (I didn’t make this):
I’m with you. I’m using Notepad++. It sounds like you’re interested in something like the Intellisense which you can get in Visual Studio. The express versions are available for free, but it has a lot of overhead. You also might try upgrading to the latest Notepad++, the version I’m using has a form of “light” hints for all the words you’ve already typed for a particular page. That’s a significant time saver, and I don’t know which version added that feature.
Also, I would categorically recommend AGAINST using an editor that lets you write HTML and CSS side by side. In my experience, no matter how “useful” this tool is, it is far to dangerous. It allows you to engage in simultaneous development of your XHTML and CSS. That’s seductive, but anytime you’re worried about more than one thing at a time, the result is that you do both badly. Write your XHTML first. Then style it with CSS. That’s the only way to guarantee that you pay attention to what you’re doing and execute each phase well. Will you have to go back and tweak the XHTML to provide the hooks you need? Absolutely. But a tabbed editor like Notepad++ puts these parts within easy reach while significantly discouraging you from mixing your development tasks.
I have to agree, you shouldn’t even bother looking at the commercial products when the free products do everything a commercial editor can. The only exception I can think of would be Coda but that’s purely out of the way it’s implemented rather than the raw power behind it. I use Notepad++ regularly and have no complaints about how it functions. What I would say is that commercial doesn’t always mean best, the free stuff which is available for use can run many commercial products under the water (partly why I moved away from commercial software development). Even Dreamweaver is far too bloated for my liking, I like simplicity, ease of use and those little flourishes which make your life easier, and Notepad++ does the job for me.
I agree, but I as well use Notepad++ as it comes in hand for some things I do. It doesn’t have some of the things you would find in some of the commercial packages, if only it did or there was something that did, I would jump on it. Overall NotePad++ is a good, program.
OK, I haven’t seen that before.