Hi Duncan,
Thanks for the summary of your experiences with Dreamweaver.
nice to know someone read it
I would be interested to hear what you feel is the advantage of
BBEdit over Dreamweaver?
I would have to say it's largely the nice mix of features and
simplicity. The interface is as complicated as you want - or just a
singular window. Too many programs these days have a billion features
and then have a million buttons, panels, dialog boxes etc. I know
what I am doing (or at least, like to think so). I don't need a
wizard to set my page background to fuchsia.
So is there something BBEdit can offer that Dreamweaver doesn't do?
BBedit is more than just a web IDE. It can edit any text document and
has great support for a shed load of languages - Perl, Phython, C++,
Java, XML, Rez, Fortran etc lots of things I'll never use. It can run
Shell scripts from within the app has a command line tool too (though
I haven't toyed with these much). The FTP support is good but a
little cumbersome. It's grep support is great (tho I've never
mastered it).
It just feels like a really solid program. Everything is well thought
out. It offers a myriad of *useful* features but in a very svelte
little app. Dreamweaver is too helpful (read: bloated). I find it
does end up just getting in the way - much like that bloody paper
clip in office! ("I see you're making a web site...")
Why would you start programming in BBEdit and then go over to
Dreamweaver to finish it off?
Mainly the speed. I don't think it's much to do with my old machine
as I am quite patient. I type fast so I don't need little pop up
menus and auto complete things (I know you can turn it off in DW).
I like the way you can have a separate preview window - so you can
have the the code and preview side by side (not above and below). I
like the pop-up function menu too (it works for CSS selectors, HTML
tags and PHP functions).
I guess I am just used to BBEdit but I do like having DW as an
option. Once you have the template down it's great to create the
specific pages in DW using the template tools. Then drop in the
content - edit it in situ. Even some of the image functions are
useful (crop, resize etc.). Oh, and the speel check, though BB has
that now. DW's also useful when you inherit sites.
I like the FTP synchronizing feature in DW. It's easy to hit the key
combo to upload a single page. In BB you have to either be editing
the remote file (a handy feature but it means you don't have a local
copy) or use the 'save to FTP server'.
The synchronizing of a whole site is a necessity. I don't think BB
does it quite like DW - I think it has a compare thing. I've actually
been using Transmit quite a bit. The dock upload thing is nifty - you
set up the site and you can just drag local docs to the icon and it
uploads them to the appropriate directory. Clever.
Umm... sorry about the rant. I don't normally hold my own opinion so
highly.
Duncan
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