In my first article I wanted to discuss about most down-to-the-ground aspect of web design which is choice of text editor.
It is not a news that you can use such simple tools as Windows-provided Notepad (on top of MS Office – their best piece of software
). However, Notepad has many limitations. The most obvious is the lack
of formatting. When you create the html tags in it, it does not help you
to align them so it is your job to make sure every tag is properly
closed and aligned/formatted according to the web design best practices. I use Notepad only when I have nothing better at my disposal.A way better tool is an editor I found many years ago which is called Notepad++. As the name suggests, it is an enhanced text editor. The advantage of Notepad++ is that it somewhat knows what you’re doing – it colors the tags with different schemes and by doing so it makes the code more understandable to the Web Developer. It also aligns the tags according to the good convention – all tags are properly aligned and little vertical dots appears in each block of code so it is easy to follow divs, lists, etc. Another advantage is that you can get fully portable version (I will write about portable tools on other occasion).
Recently I have found Sublime to be also very advanced tool. It doesn’t vary significantly from Notepad++ apart from it’s neat darkish interface (which I praise to be honest, but that’s just me), having basically the same cool functionality but it has one more function that I have never witnessed else. It can do a group rename to the similar tags. For example if you are referring to a css class used three times in your project but you’ve misspelled the class name and copied it three times, you can just double click on one of the misspelled tags and you can rename all three tags in just one go. Cool, isn’t it? And it is also portable!
But I guess the editor that impressed me the most was one suggested to me by our Senior Developer at DigitalEire. I would never expected it but it’s my “old college friend” NetBeans. On top of solid functionality it offers a very good tool to browse in appearance of a specific keyword throughout the project files. Also it holds ftp client sort of “built-in”. Every time you save a file in the project, given that the project structure is the same on your machine as it is on the server – it can be overwritten straight on, or you can decide when you want to upload it. I guess Eclipse for php offers similar functionality but I had no chance to check that as yet.
I have to admit that I like the free NetBeans more than expensive DreamWeaver…
Ah, DreamWeaver. Many say that it’s the best web design package. Many would question it. It definitely has many exciting functions, couple interesting ones (like image-map generator built-in) but other than that it hadn’t impressed me that much as other programs of the Adobe Creative Suite which is being used by our guys from DigitalEire. Maybe I simply don’t know it that much…
Next time I will tell about browsers… See you then!
No comments:
Post a Comment