Thread

I really wanted to give Dreamweaver a fighting chance, but between the bloody “_notes” folders everywhere; god-awful slow, unresponsive, and schizophrenic FTP; and general buggyness, I’m giving up.

So what do you rockstar pros use? I’m on a PC, so Coda and Transmit are a no (I don’t like Coda that much anyway). Suggestions? I would love an option with blazing fast FTP a la Filezilla and some nice auto-complete coding features. Whatcha think?

not advocating anything specific - but why don’t you turn off the notes folder? problem solved.
FTP can be slow - but usually because of settings. I would never say it was painfully slow.

But code editor wise - i am yet to find something i am 100% happy with. And not being on MAC it seems their is nothing the true strength and ease of packages such as Coda.

I turn “Maintain Design Notes” off for every site I do. It doesn’t seem to make any difference.

As for the FTP, it’s not just slowness, but overall buggyness. For example, there have been many instances where I have told Dreamweaver to upload files, the file upload window pops up momentarily, but it doesn’t upload any files. Or it only uploads some and not others. And sometimes when this happens it never tells me that it didn’t upload the file, it just didn’t do it. This causes severe problems when I am missing a critical file somewhere on my site but I don’t know which one. This is especially problematic with EE sites.

And I realize the FTP is slow for reasons like file syncing, but I wish there was an option to turn that off on the days I just need to do a big batch upload or quick changes.

The one feature Coda has that I desperately wish Dreamweaver had is the live page edit feature. SO nice for those quick updates!

I started out on Homesite. It was originally developed by Allair. When Allair was bought out by Macromedia, they released a few minor versions and then dropped the curtain. I loved Homesite! I ended up using Zend Studion 5 for several years and loved it as well. I tried to move into Zend Studio 6 but it’s new eclipse backbone felt too much like eclipse PDT, which is free. Guilty in comparison, I think Zend Studio 5 is way superior to Zend Studio 6. 😊 As mentioned above, eclipse PDT is a viable option. But, there is one editor that does not get much attention. NetBeans. They have released a PHP specific version that contains niceties like code-hinting, code folding, templates, cross-file class/method/function insights, color coding, support for multiple file formats, etc… Another good editor that doesn’t get much recognition is Aptana. Both NetBeans and Aptana are free. They are heavy downloads outside of broadband, but worth checking out.

http://netbeans.org/
http://www.aptana.com/

I loved DW way back from Ultradev days but I have given up on it since MX version and especially since adobe got their hands on it.
Now I truly like WeBuilder which has some feel of Homesite/DW/TopStyle. Well worth the price.

I love Dreamweaver, but probably only use about 5% of the functionality they’ve built into it. I found FTP direct through the program to be too slow, so when I’m not building locally, I use a separate FTP program to upload files.

What buggyness are you experiencing? Is it on an older version? I’ve been using the program for years and can’t find much to complain about.

Why not try e-texteditor?
http://www.e-texteditor.com/

It’s a port of Textmate for Windows.

Another option would be Aptana:
http://www.aptana.com/

design notes is not the only area that needs turning off, i think from memory there is 1 or 2 others - try on the ftp page unticking maintain syncronisation information, and you still might then need to tidy up the folders if not a new project.

In terms of buggyness - i can never 100% point a finger at dreamweavers ftp software. when i upload, it logs and informs me of all missed files. i have been infuriated sometime when firefox does not update as it still thinks that file not present page is still not present even though i just uploaded it, or it thinks that the image that wasn’t there 10 seconds ago, still isn’t there - but thats just the way FF is, clear cache and its fine (or use another browser).

i have used DW from the start through early versions to more recent MX, CS1 CS3 and now CS5 - mainly because i need it for the other software (photoshop, indesign, illustrator, etc). I could move - familiarity is a time saver though. Aptana i liked - but need to use more though - but think its a worthwhile one to try.

I see I am going to have many months of Demo trials in my future…

I agree that Dreamweaver has more functionality than any hand-coder could ever need or want. In fact, that’s a big problem I have with it. Adobe has spent most of their time turning DW into the ultimate WYSIWYG editor, with all those bells and whistles meant for the amateur weekender; while therefore ignoring the needs of the hand-coding, standards-compliant developer.

@vosSavant: I have CS4. A specific bug would be: on a PC, when one goes to choose a local site folder, Dreamweaver won’t select the topmost directory. So I have to manually type in the site directory.

The most annoying bugs are as I explained above: Dreamweaver will pretend to upload files when in fact it has ignored many files completely, resulting in site problems. I simply do not trust it with large batch uploads. I use FileZilla for anything larger than a brochure site.

@nevsie: You are correct, I looked deeper into the “_notes” issue and there are some other areas that need to be turned off to completely remove “_notes”. But nonetheless it seems like such a bad way of storing Dreamweaver-specific information. Why should I have to spam up my server with empty “_notes” folders that are only used by Dreamweaver during development and have no affect on the live site?

Yeah the only time DW is worth having when it comes bundled…buying it alone is such a rip off. Not to mention they insist on keeping the spry framework…who knows why though. They been talking about making a valid code for last 2-3 editions but desire to “Look like Adobe” product has gotten better of them.
Its wysiwyg for table based (forums) layouts is still great…but not $400.00 great. Last two years of its use was mainly for the same - familiarity and habits and the code editor. I could hardly justify staying in CS game.

E-text editor is pretty sweet but it always felt like a product that (free) notepad++ can be with a bit of tweaks. Creator of their screen-cast should read children books….he just puts me to sleep.

Aptana and alike java based apps are just so huge and slow.

I think that EE dev runs this as well: http://htmleditors.shadowboxcreative.ca/

I have been using NetBeans 6.9 recently.  Add Mercurial and you’ve got a very nice editing system.  Aptana has visual preview, and is a fine editor.  Even though I do most of my dev work in NetBeans (used to be Aptana), I open NotePad++ several times a day for some task I need to do quickly.

May I suggest Style master CSS editor http://westciv.com/style_master/ (but you can edit html in it as well) with CSE HTML Validator http://www.htmlvalidator.com/ as a plug in. Did me great service for several years before Coda moved my work back onto the Mac.

Now I truly like WeBuilder which has some feel of Homesite/DW/TopStyle. Well worth the price.

I second that 😊

I’ve used WeBuilder for years and for me at least I’ve never found anything better. I even bought 3 years worth of updates in advance!

There’s a real gap in the Windows market IMO for a good editor, especially something that plays super-nice with EE.

Since moving to Mac at the start of the year, there’s once nice bit of functionality I’m missing from Textmate/Coda - and that’s the ability to format to code (unless I’m missing the obvious).

I normally have my css like so when coding

selector {property: value; property: value;}

which from code optimisation point is grand, however, it doesn’t read well for me. DW has the ability to change that at a key press.

Again though, not worth $400.

If anyone can suggest similar function for TM/Coda I’d be a happy bunny.

I waffle between VIM & TextMate. Depends on which I prefer.  crashy or having to remember 200k keyboard shortcuts.  So if you’re on windows, I suppose E-TextEditor would probably be nice.  Or learn VIM.  :D