Mine is really old, Coda 2.
I’m looking at replacements. I want something that not only handles the coding side (mainly HTML & CSS), but also file management.
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Hey @samRowlands,
I use “Bootstrap Studio” https://bootstrapstudio.io/ and when keeping things simple “Carrd” https://carrd.co/ . I often do product walk-throughs (as single page, sectioned sites in “Carrd”).
Both very reliable and economical solutions.
Kind regards, Andrew
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Personally: jetbrain’s Webstorm
You might like https://pinegrow.com/
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Since you like Coda, have you tried Nova? I find it to be a worthy successor. It’s definitely different, but should be familiar. I guess if I didn’t have Nova, or had to use Windows, VSCode would be my next choice.
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Have you considered a content management system (CMS)?
Not really a code editor, but it is easy to build/maintain web sites. They have themes and lots of free and comercial plugins. I use Joomla.
I’m in love with PHPStorm. It’s an amazing IDE.
That said, I have an eye on RapidWeaver. They are doing a rewrite and adding a “Data” module but they haven’t said much more than that yet. My hope is draggable inputs that can be assigned to the “Data”.
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I tried Nova right after they launched it and wasn’t happy with it, so I stuck with Coda 2 until now.
Thanks for reminding me to take another look, it is similar, but also different. However it’s the most “Coda” like I’ve found so far and there is a discount for “upgrading” so…
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I’ve found myself much happier with it once I started breaking my old habits and doing things the more modern/trendy way. I have build steps setup to transpile my javascript and scss.
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Nova is a fast, beautiful app. Excellent as most of their products. What I don’t like so much is the dependency on third party plugins for development languages. Not that those plugins are bad, some are quite brilliant indeed (i.e. the Rust plugin), but they don’t seem to get updated quite frequently if at all 
- plus the downside of the company is that they have shown in the past that they might stop development on an app from one day to the other.
But it is one of the very few apps left, which works in the real “mac” way (or at least almost).
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Most stuffs I am writing with Webstorm from Jetbrains so I have html and JavaScript in a for me perfect IDE. There is nothing I need as addon. The graphics I am editing with InkScape and Gimp. Nothing more needed for me.
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Same here, basically I like that with jetbrains all IDEs for all languages I’m using are working pretty much the same. But even w/o that, I’m using Github CoPilot quite extensively and this limits in general the IDE / Editors you can use as many don’t have an integration at all, or a bad one. Jetbrains IDE having now integrated AI (though still beta) into their latest releases is another reason why I won’t change.
But quite frankly I believe that Visual Studio Code is as well a good choice to work with HTML / CSS. Integreated Live Previews, Hot Reloads. You need some time to find all the usefull plugins but even though it is an “electron app”, performance is pretty good on modern equipment. I personally don’t like the way how to navigate through VSC, but that’s mainly a matter of taste.
I think the biggest “weakness” of Jetbrains is that they are not marketing too much, that they will discount you the longer you stay with them. As I’m working with their products on a daily basis it is a no-brainer for me.
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I use Nova after being a Coda and Coda 2 user for many years. Honestly, I’m yet to find anything that can handle file management and multiple publishing destinations as well as Nova does. Visual Studio and Sublime etc. all have publishing plugins, but they can’t touch Nova for flexibility and usability in that regard. Nova also has great GIT integration.
If you tried Nova when it was first released, I’d give it another go. It’s changed a lot in the last couple of years. I’ve also setup Nova to be a lot more Coda like with the sidebar / file management on the left etc.
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yes, I agree. I liked it pretty much from the look & feel and it is really a beauty and working very well. What concerned me a bit are their extensions: https://extensions.panic.com Similar to Xojo it is quite a small ecosystem.
But as always, it depends on your needs and what you want to achieve. VSC is probably hard to beat in terms of constant updates (which can be an annoyance too), JetBrains ecosystem is slower but usually far more stable.
But if you take for instance NOVA’s rust extension. some 6k downloads, last updated 2 years ago, no one knows if the author (one man show) is still using it … kind of a chicken / egg issue, but it is very hard for a new IDE to gain market share if macOS only, and JetBrains and VSC being the de facto standards …
I know what you mean about the plugin ecosystem. I’ve looked for what I thought would be really obvious plugins, but not been able to find them. I do think this is forcing Panic to make some functions first party in Nova (like publishing), which is no bad thing.
I only use a few extension myself. A couple of ‘Beautify’ type plugins, a really good ‘ToDo’ plugin that puts a list of all the project’s TODO comments in the sidebar, so I can use the code itself as a todo list, and finally the ‘DocBlockr’ plugin that generates phpDocumentor comments automatically from the function definition. It’s a handy shortcut as all you have to do is fill in the specifics later.
Nova does everything I need for now and it’s certainly streamlined my workflow in terms of publishing to servers.
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And that’s perfect then. Again, what I really like(d) in Nova that is really working the “mac”-way, as in the old days. It is really a very nice, well thought through application. But the Rust extension for instance was already missing many things which other IDEs have implemented. On the other hand it is an unfair comparison. CLion from jetbrains and it’s Rust plugin gets updates every fortnight, but in comparison to Nova they hava an army of devs …
I guess PANIC had no other choice. Either they would have deployed a half baken product or they had to open it via extensions to the community. The chicken-egg-problem being that their community is rather small. My fear (and experience) with Panic is: they will either get that community, or the product might again be dead all the sudden …
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In my past Mac-Life I used Coda as mentioned by others, followed by Rapidweaver in conjunction with Foundation Stacks and Tumults’ Hype App.
Today I am mostly using static site Hugo Framework and Django for Websites, mostly editing HTML and CSS by my own, editing in Gnome Builder on Linux.
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OMG, I started using Coda with V1 also, and that workflow really vibed with me. Had Coda 2 and Diet Coda too. I was sad when it was discontinued. I was sad when Nova became a defacto subscription.
Might have been a bad thing because now I’m kinda addicted to that workflow. It also made me a bit sloppy. Recently, I’ve started using a mix of apps. I didn’t realize Gnome Builder allowed easy editing of HTML/CSS so I want to try that now.
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Whisk - for prototyping. It has instant preview for PHP and HTML/JS, so I’ll frequently bang out a look and template on Whisk, before splitting the files and functions and working with a different editor. I like the look.
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CodeRunner - same reason as Whisk, except it supports many more languages. I tried using it as an IDE but I don’t think it’s geared toward that usage and it gets confusing.
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NeoVim - when working in the command line or making edits, or working across platforms. I use catppuccin as the theme.
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Sublime Text - I primarily use this one for projects because it can display files similar to Coda. I use the seafoam theme I pulled from BBEdit, a file list on the left, and a map on the right.
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mWeb - For organizing and exporting markdown content as HTML
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Bootstrap Studio - For rapidly making things that need bootstrap or when I don’t want to make a stylesheet. Also for working on pieces of projects visually.
Less often:
- Kate - usually only when working in linux. It’s really nice, and incredibly flexible in fitting what I want to do.
Tried and didn’t like:
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Visual Studio Code: The application that made me hate web apps on desktop. With a large enough projects, I get to watch the letters I type appear on screen long after I type them.
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Brackets: was way slower that VS Code.
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Notepad++: Windows only, and chaotic UI. May be great, but not my cup of tea.
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I’m probably dating myself, but I started using Adobe products starting in 1991 when I was working on my Master’s of Science in Medical Illustration. It was also during the 90’s that I learned Macromedia Dreamweaver, FireWorks, Director before it was sold to Adobe. I was a multimedia specialist during the 90’s creating interactive kiosks for surgeons at the Medical College using Macromedia Director (Lingo), Media Mogul as well as Softimage3D running on a SGI Indigo2 Extreme. The DotCom era was a lot of fun. 
I have used or still use many of the applications mentioned above (Coda, Nova, VS Code, etc… I have a subscription to JetBrains products which are great. But on Windows, I tend to gravitate to WeBuilder which I’ve been using for years. And for some prototyping, I use VisualNeo. I also like using CudaText editor. So what do Dreamweaver, WeBuilder, VisualNeo and CudaText have in common? They were all written in Delphi/Object Pascal. 
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My needs are much simpler since I really dont do a lot of web development
I’d like a decent drag & drop type web page editor that I dont have to learn all the CSS & such for that simple needs I have
Any recommendations from the group ?
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Man, then you surely know Allaire Homesite and Coldfusion. It was bought by Macromedia and couple of years later by Adobe.
Back in the 1990ies developing web application was something between writing perl hard core scripts and CGI executables spitting out everything to stout. Coldfusion was a real booster for dynamic, database driven websites and quite easy to use.
I remember those times, Lingo in Director 6 aswell. But to be honest, I am happy we have overcome this dark ages of proprietary web extensions and websites with badges “best viewed with IE4” or “best viewed with Netscape” 
And I still remember the major disturbances of force when steve jobs announced 2007, that iPhones never ever will have something like flash, and he was damn right
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