The response to my comping application survey was incredible, but didn’t unearth any hidden gems that I’d hoped. Fireworks MX is still the best one for me, and I’ve been following a suggestion in the comments to restart it every now and again. The solves the sluggishness problem, the same as it does for Safari, and I don’t mind doing it every now and then to keep it running well.
Now then, Text Editors. I feel like I’ve tried every one going for OS X. BBEdit, Textmate, Smultron, Tag, SubEthaEdit and many more. My firm favourite is still skEdit, and I’m shocked that more people don’t use it.
Here are some of my favourite features of skEdit:
- Project manager window to launch site folders.
- File view sidebar - makes it so quick to switch between files
- Auto tag completion (really automatic - no key combo needed)
- HTML and CSS code hinting - this is a big one. No other mac application apart from Dreamweaver appears to offer this - do correct me if I’m wrong.
- Easy to create snippets, and set key combo’s for them. ‘Create unordered list nav’ is my favourite. This takes a list of words, and adds the
<ul>,<li>, and<a href>tags for you.
One thing skEdit does miss out on is an inbuilt web preview, which other editors had implemented as soon as the Safari webcore became available. The time skEdit saves me is incalculable.
So what’s your favourite? Are you using some obscure shareware editor that I should really check out? Again, the one criteria - must work on OS X.