Coda: An All-In-One Web Developer Tool
As most web developers can tell you there’s three basic things you need to build a site, a good text editor, an FTP client and a terminal window for SSH. Typically developers jump between two or three programs to handle these disparate tasks, but Coda, a new application from Panic Software, makers of the popular Transmit FTP client, combines all three in one window and adds some extras to boot.
Coda features a single window working space divided up into tabs that separate out each task. By default the tabs include FTP bookmarks, an text editor, a preview pane, a CSS editor, a terminal interface and “books” which offers some handy reference materials.
As with most apps from Panic the interface is clean, slick and well thought out without resorting the unnecessary gimmicks (the same goes of the excellent Javascript on Panic’s website).
The first thing most developers will want to know is, how good is the text editor? And actually it’s pretty good for a 1.0 release. The editor supports customizable syntax highlighting, entab/detab, regular expressions, collaborative editing, auto complete and more.
Coda’s editor even supports drag-and-drop regular expression building for beginners (old hands can still write expressions manually). The collaborative editing features are similar to those in the SubEthaEdit program, however I haven’t tested them.
While some of the functionality of a mature text editor is there, Coda’s editor is no BBEdit or TextMate. How much that matters to you probably depends on your work habits.
The rest of Coda provides excellent replacements for both FTP (essentially Transmit running inside another application) and Terminal.
Perhaps the nicest feature is the ability to split panes between Coda tabs which allows you, for instance, to simultaneously edit a remote file in the text editor and then run the file via the command line in the lower portion of the window. Coda can also split windows vertically for those working on widescreen displays.
In fact the Coda windows can be split as many times as you’d like, so if you have the screen real estate you could conceivably have all aspects of the app open in one window.
The CSS editor is handy for those that aren’t familiar with the syntax for every obscure CSS property, others will likely find it faster to edit CSS files directly.
The live preview pane leverages WebKit to provide previews of live files, which saves you from having to jump between browser and editor. However since the advent of WebKit most text editors already offer this type of functionality, but none that I know of offer the Javascript debugging features found in Coda’s preview.
I’ve only been using Coda for about an hour, but I’m already hooked, at least partly. I don’t think I’ll abandon BBEdit just yet, but the ability to have my web preview and terminal interface together in one app is quite nice.
If there were some way to use BBEdit as an external editor I might be willing to pony up the $80 for a copy of Coda.
Owners of Transmit can purchase Coda for the slightly discounted price of $70. Normal price for Coda will be $100. The curious can download and use a demo Coda for two weeks with no limitations.
