Over the years I have used many coding applications on PC and Mac. Notepad++, BBEdit, Dreamweaver, Smultron, and many others have made appearances in my coding workflow. But I have never been as pleased with a coding application as I am with Coda.
Unfortunately for Windows users, Coda is a OS X only application. However I now of at least one Web Developer who switched to Mac just so he could use Coda. The application is from Panic and costs $99 but you can try it out a free 30-day trial.
One of the best features of Coda is Projects. Like some other coding applications Coda organizes your projects into groups, however I find that the system used in Coda is the most intuitive and easy to use. You create a project and even choose a starting local and remote folder to open. You can save you (S)FTP login info and have Coda automatically open you relevant local and remote directories when you enter a Project. It also opens all files you were previously working on when you last used that Project. This is extremely helpful for me as I am commonly in some state of working on a number of different clients’ work which reside on different servers. With Coda, a can pause working on a major website redesign, to switch to a different client’s Facebook App to make a few quick changes and be back in the exact same place I was in a jiffy.
Coda also has a very easily editable syntax coloring preferences. And a great feature where you can load documentation into the “Books” area for a quick reference when coding.
Next week we will examine the Zen Coding Plugin for Coda and talk about how it can triple your typing speed.
