Coda

I've tried many web development applications since switching to Mac in January of '04. Each has it's pros and cons. Some are great text editors, but don't have decent file/project management panels. Some are feature heavy and bloated with stuff I just don't use. Coda is different. It's not a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver, and it's not a code-only geeky editor like Vi or BBEdit or even TextMate.

Where Coda excels, in my opinion, is with it's project management. The opening window shows either a list or screenshots of your sites which include the same information as Transmit (or other FTP application) including local and remote path, etc. It remembers which files were open in that project next time you return and also gives a visual of what's been changed locally but not yet uploaded to the remote host. That feature blew me away, it's the best thing *ever*.

There are still features included in the software that I don't use, but it's definitely not bloated in any way. I hand-code my CSS so have no use for the built-in CSS editor. It has built in support to online reference books for things like PHP, but Googling "whatever site:php.net" seems to be quicker for me since I know what I'm looking for.

Coda is still new, and the discussion boards are going crazy with feature requests like similar visuals for Subversion among other things. The projects window is best suited for users who have fewer sites they manage... I have many, so it gets full and somewhat difficult to use w/o the search feature really quickly. Coda is lean, mean and does the job. By far the best editor I've used in a long time.

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