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General discussion

Best HTML text editor for a mac ?

Jul 30, 2008 12:18PM PDT

I have used a free program called mi 2.1.6 which does a nice job of highlighting tags, but has been unsupported for a few years now. I was wondering if there was anything better out there - free, donationware, or paid - that anyone feels is a great program worth trying ?

I have done a bit of research already, and came up with this article http://mac360.com/index.php/mac360/comments/faceoff_which_is_the_best_text_editor_ever/

Anyone have a personal favorite ?

Discussion is locked

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Built in is fine
Aug 16, 2008 12:24AM PDT

I personally use the built in text editor that mac has. You just have to deactivate the rich text editor functions so that it's in plain text mode. You do this by going into the preferences and format from rich text to plain text. When you save, make sure hide extension is hidden and obviously make sure that you put .html at the end of the file name or whatever extension depending on if you're using server technology or not. Otherwise it just won't work because it's writing as a rich text editor which is useless for coding.

In terms of functionality such as code hints and validation. I think it would be far more beneficial that you learn the code properly and making you a better developer and being able to validate code if you have limited resources. Also code hinting just slows things down. I'd rather just type it rather than having to select from a pop up list functions. If you go through the W3 tutorials you can't go wrong.

I also have Dreamweaver for the more graphical stuff. But I only use it for making the layouts. The rest of the time it's just a text editor and Apache Server for text PHP sites.

I hope this has helped.

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Correction
Aug 16, 2008 12:27AM PDT

What I meant to say was "When you save, make sure hide extension is unchecked".

I think could be mildly dyslexic.

Bye...

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Coda, of course!!
Sep 5, 2008 2:19PM PDT

I once tried it at a friends Mac and boy... It's amazing! It does simplify all your work by autofilling the code as you write and it organizes all your files in a mini-Finder in the left. It's HTML coding the Mac way, really!

Just try it out for free!

BTW it has something called "Sites" where you can enter all the information of all your sites, like where it's stored on your drive, where it's stored online (your server, your server's protocoll, username, password, root) etc. and it tracks all the changes you do offline, so when you're happy with what you've accomplished offline it will with the click of a button syncronize the server so that it is up to date.

All of this is built in into a single window. You can do all of that without leaving Coda!

www.panic.com/coda

Check it out!

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Best HTML text editor for Mac
Sep 26, 2008 5:50PM PDT