Alternatives to Coda

[gno]

Hi Guys,

I’m a new guy on these forums, though a long timer reader of this site. So I’ll start with a little introduction of myself. I’m a 20 year old guy from Copenhagen, Denmark. I started making websites at the age of 11 and ever since I have been helping friends with different kinds of projects. For most of the years I’ve been mostly focused at server side languages – especially PHP. However, in the past year or so, my interest for front end design has emerged. I study Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen – or well – some might say I’m not active enough to call it studying.

The reason for that is my recent discovery; quite a few acquaintances of me is making a living of web design and web development, even though they are quite a lot less skilled than I am. So I thought to myself – Why should I not be able to do so too?

That was a brief introduction of me – lets get on with it.

In November I decided it was time to buy my self a new computer. I ended up with a brand new MacBook Pro 15″ (with the higher resolution screen). The main reason behind this was the OS X’s background story as a POSIX-like system. Basicly, OS X is nothing more than a UNIX-variant. I have been running different kind of Linux distributions for the last couple of years, but I have had a machine with Windows all along. I could not live without Photoshop.

While working in my linux environment I got a really great setup for developing and maintaining websites. What I did was basicly just to make all my websites network filesystems (using sshfs through MacFUSE – google it if you want to try it out) that I could mount when I needed access to them. They appeared as any other harddrive on my computer, and worked just like if it was. It seemed as if I was working with local stored files.

The moment I got my mac I tried to setup a similar solution. Sadly, the only way I found to do it on a mac, was incredibly slow and sluggish. So I ended up using TextMate as my editor and CyberDuck to connect to the sites over SSH. It is far from as sleek as it was on my Linux workstation, but it is ok. I can at least use keyboard navigation in CyberDuck and open the marked file in TextMate with Command-K.

I tried Coda now – and man I love the integrated remote filesystem browser! But as much as I love that, I hate the editor it self. It is surprising how the same team of developers could make such a good ftp client and such a horrible text editor… I have been working with it for a week now, and I’ve been telling my self; “You will start to like the editor someday” – but I do not think that I can manage using that rubbish anymore.

The only solution I can think of, that is comparable to Coda’s remote filesystem browser is the SSHFS one. Sadly, the OSX version of that is rubbish. The SSHFS solution would let me open a site as a project in TextMate – oh – how sweet that could be!

Do you have any ideas? Is there a plugin to TextMate, so it can work on remotely stored files? Is there other ways to implement SSHFS on a mac, than the one through MacFUSE? Is there other editors than Coda which would be worth checking out?

I hope some of you longtime-macusers will tag along and throw some input to a fresh mac-convert like me. :-)

[TheDoc]

Welcome to the forums!

Personally, I use Coda. I think both its FTP and Editor are fantastic – but that’s neither here nor there! Before that I was using Dreamweaver, simply due to the fact that it was bundled with Adobe’s Creative Suite. I enjoyed its FTP features, but found it overall quite clunky (one of the reasons why I love Coda so much – sleek and simple).

[gno]

I guess editors will always be a matter of taste. I’ve been using vim, a terminal based text-editor, until I made the jump to mac. I had heard so much buzz about TextMate, so I had to try it. It is the only “GUI” editor I have liked so far.

Dreamweaver is out of the question. I tried it, even though it is more than a few years ago, I know that it have not changed enough to earn a second chance. What I’m looking for is a non-bullshit editor with sleek FTP browser… I guess this would be the TLDR-version of the OP. ;-)

Coda is close to perfect on the browser part. But the Editor is really not my cup of tea, to put it nicely.

[Jerm993]

I use both notepad++ and pspad, but i also have a windows system and i don’t think either of those work, but pspad has a nice ftp built in. and i like it’s text editor.

[allenwd4x]

I too have used the Coda and it was very interesting as it covers all the features ………

[Historical Forums User]

notepad++ is the best

[TT_Mark]

If I were to actually get round to buying an editor for my Mac, rather than just using an old copy of DreamWeaver someone gave me, I would use Espresso by MacRabbit. Not sure if it has all you need, but I much preferred it to Coda

[gno]

TT_Mark, I have heard a lot of good stuff about MacRabbits CSSEditor – I will give it a shot. Thanks alot!

[TT_Mark]

Randomly, Chris Spooner linked this on Twitter today http://is.gd/ktKIt

[Author]

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