Let’s hope TextMate version 2 comes out with an integrated project management / ftp solution.

Panic people are nice. They are quick (comparatively speaking) to respond when you have a question, and I love Transmit. Coda was a bit of a step away from TextMate, but I find myself always falling back on it.

Now all it needs is a way to publish files to a server, and Coda is history! I get the sense that those guys are full of themselves anyway, they don’t listen to user feedback.

Coda can’t, that’s great. Thanks for the tip!

1) Type str_ then hit Option-Esc to get a completion list.
2) Type str_replace then hit Option-F1 to get a code hint.
3) Type str_replace then hit Ctrl-H to bring up the official PHP documentation.

Coda can’t do that.

Like I said, I was hoping Espresso would match that, but it falls short on both while still costing an arm and a leg. Coda’s license was worth it to see if it got a lot better around 1.5, but TextMate has paid for itself many times over.

Hadn’t noticed the PHP/HTML thing though. What do you mean about the cursor not knowing? You mean syntax highlighting?

Now, one problem with Coda, if you’re working with a PHP file, and it has HTML in it, Coda doesn’t know if your cursor is editing within a PHP block or not. I wonder if TextMate does. I’ll have to give it a try, thanks for the info, Josh!

The one thing I dislike about TextMate is it’s lack of project management. I was hoping that Espresso would bridge the gap between TextMate and Coda, but it felt odd.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Coda. For version 1.6.5 it’s a great program. I just prefer TextMate for 99% of the coding. Coda works best for simpler html / minor php based sites while TextMate is great for handling mass amounts of code and manipulating it with ease.

my workaround right now is to use phpDesigner under vmware fusion…

Yeah the more I use this program the more I dislike it. It’s very pretty at first glance (what I suppose this review is based upon) but in practice it’s severely limited. You can’t preview images nor can you drag to integrate them so you’re back to the Finder for dimensions. You can’t quickly upload non text files so you’re back to Transmit for FTP. You can’t do visual CSS editing so you’re back to CSS edit.

Calling Espresso “one gorgeous, focused app” is a bunch of marketing hyperbole. At best its an adequate text editor with lots of extensibility and potential. But I don’t think you’ll find anyone that can actually use this app in its current form for real work. A- is being awfully generous.

While it is pretty (but so is my wallpaper), I find myself either fighting it or jumping to other apps for everything but text editing. Fighting the FTP sync to not be so stupid, fighting opening image files to preview, fighting the “live” preview (I get this for free in a browser), fighting having to look up every last CSS attribute (hints?!), etc, etc.

So sad. It may be good one day, but currently, it’s crap. Back to the tried-and-true TextMate + FF w/ FireBug or Stainless w/ it’s Inspect Element (way to go Mesa Dynamics!).

http://www.panic.com/coda/

Basic things that Mac users take for grated, like drag-and-drop support for the Snippets feature, is nowhere to be seen. The whole snippets feature is awfully bad.

Unless your needs for web development are really limited, definitely wait this one out. Espresso 1.0 is the equivalent of an early beta right now.

1. Espresso can only live preview static HTML files. The MacRabbit website seems to indicate that it can live preview just about anything but that’s clearly not the case. Local servers aren’t even supported and anything other than HTML requires you to type in the address of the file and manually hit reload after each edit.

2. Espresso doesn’t integrate with your media files whatsoever. No image or video previews and dragging these files into a project window simply creates a broken link. So there’s no shortcuts for adding an image to your page – Espresso can’t even detect its dimensions.

3. The sidebar forgets its settings constantly. Set a file to quick publish and then add it to your workspace. Quick publish is now unchecked. In fact the entire sidebar resets.

4. And lets not forget the lack of visual CSS editing & X-Ray

All things considered Espresso isn’t bad but it does need a lot of work.

Once they make Espresso context-aware, then it will be a killer app.

I like Espresso but I think it will need a bit more refinement to seriously challenge BB Edit – then again, if you like many of BB Edit’s features but don’t want to shell out the full whack, you can always go with TextWrangler for software at a price that can’t be beaten.

Don’t try to use Text Edit unless you have to, there is no way to permanently tick the ‘ignore rich text commands’ box in File>Open and this soon becomes tiresome – also I like colour coded tags.