MarcAmos.com

In 2001 I learned how to write HTML using Microsoft Front Page while taking a Web Design and Development course at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Because of its terrible code support and counterintuitive user interface, it wasn’t very long before I knew that Front Page was the wrong application for me.

The next application I tried was Macromedia Dreamweaver, which is now Adobe Dreamweaver, somewhere around version 4. Years were spent using Dreamweaver and I was always quite satisfied with it. During that time I would often be told by so-called veteran developers that “Dreamweaver is for amateurs” and that I should “step up to a non-WYSIWYG editor, etc.”

I would tell them that I never made an edit to a document while in Dreamweaver’s Design View and I fully agreed that using a text editor in any sort of WYSIWYG mode is a novice way of writing markup. I may have been using Dreamweaver but I was writing markup in Code View all of the time. I was using Dreamweaver in the very same way they used their non-WYSIWYG editors, yet they continued to share their misinformed opinions with me.

“Whatever”, I would think to myself. The code I was writing in Dreamweaver was cleaner, more accessible, more semantic, more valid, and more cross-platform/browser-friendly than many of theirs was. I passionately studied all the rules of writing beautiful front-end code from many of the great designers/developers in the industry.

Naturally, though, I was intrigued by the so-called superiority of the non-WYSIWYG applications they kept bragging about.

In January of 2006 I switched from Windows to OS X and while transitioning my operating system I figured I would finally take the plunge and transition away from Dreamweaver to one of the well-known OS X text editors.

I tried BBEdit and its little brother TextWrangler, TextMate, and skEdit. I was impressed with each of them, but never felt perfectly comfortable with any one of them. Of those four, I stuck with skEdit for a little while. skEdit, to its credit, came the closest to satisfying all of my needs in a text editing application and I’m sure future versions will come even closer. I definitely intend to give skEdit another try in the future.

The other applications were great in their own ways, but none of them provided all of the features I was used to having in Dreamweaver. For example, a couple of them required me to switch over to an FTP application every time I needed to transfer a document, which is fine, but it slowed me down. BBEdit, in particular, didn’t feel natural to me for reasons I can’t put my finger on. In hindsight I feel it was because BBEdit was the first OS X application I tried and I was still getting used to OS X in general.

After using skEdit for a couple months I went back to using Dreamweaver.

I can’t emphasize this enough, I’m writing all of this based on my needs and my opinion of what is helpful in a text editor. I make no claims that my choices and opinions should be imposed on anybody else.

Advantages of using Dreamweaver

Here is a list of features that I couldn’t find in those other applications. Some of the application might have one or two of these features, but none had them all:

1. Dreamweaver’s Files panel displays the entire directory structure and allows you to easily cmd/cntrl+click files for upload/download. It doesn’t matter that files are not in the same directory as each other; you can highlight files from any directory and transfer them together. In other applications that had FTP built in, I had to switch the currently open directory in order to transfer files that were spread across the site’s directory structure. That was a huge time waster for me.
2. In Dreamweaver’s Code View, the bottom portion of the window shows you the DOM hierarchy leading to the element that currently contains your blinking text cursor. You are shown all of its parent elements and if you click on any one of them in that DOM hierarchy, Dreamweaver will select/highlight that element and all of its children. This is great for quickly highlighting an element and commenting it out, cutting it, copying it, etc.
3. Speaking of commenting code, it’s a nice time saver when you highlight a bit of code and click a single button (with your choice of html comment, CSS comment, JavaScript comment, etc.) to comment out your selection. Keyboard purists will frown at that, but it’s faster and avoids any errors that can occur when typing the comment code manually.
4. The built in document validator, which is capable of validating a single file or all files site-wide, is a very helpful tool to run before transferring a document or site to the remote host. It contains the validation rules for 21 different DOCTYPES and if errors do exist in your code, you can double-click any one of them and Dreamweaver will automatically open the file and place your text cursor within the invalid element. This small feature saves quite a bit of time, otherwise you have to take note of the line the error exists on and scroll until you reach that line in the document.
5. The find and replace tool is by far the easiest one I’ve used. It uses plain English, which I still enjoy, and it has options for any scenario I can think of. An example scenario could be described like this, “Find all paragraph elements with an ID of snippet and without a class attribute. Add to that element a class attribute with a value equal to extLinks and add the following after the end of the element: <hr />.” It has saved me hours of time on some of the larger site-wide changes I’ve made in the past. In a couple of the other applications I tried, the conditional statements were either hard to write or non-existant.
6. The code hint tool is quite helpful, though a bit amateur to completely rely on. I’ve been writing markup and CSS for about six years and I still don’t have all of the attribute/property/value names memorized; especially some of the obscure CSS properties that I sometimes use. It’s very convenient to see a list of all possible attributes/properties/values appear when I press the spacebar, colon, opening quote, etc. Then, I’ll type the first few letters of my desired attribute/property/value, press Enter, and it automatically fills in the rest. Amateur? Maybe, but it’s faster than searching Google or the W3C for that obscure property name you know you need, and it definitely cuts down on human error… “Was it text-transform or text-transformation?”
7. This last feature will probably cause a few of you to raise your eyebrows and curse my name, but please remember that this is my list of needs, not everybody else’s. When I see an error on a web page I’ll quickly open the file to make the appropriate fix and in some cases it’s not easy to figure out where the broken element lives within the document’s code. It’s not entirly hard, but it can take time to find where said element is and time is money. I’ll temporarily switch over to Design View and click on the exact spot that shows the trouble. Then I’ll switch back to Code View to make the necessary fix. Because of this quick action, my text cursor is immediately placed in the element I want to edit and I didn’t have to look through lines of code to find it.

Those are the features I can think of off the top of my head and as I said before, I know some of them are available in most of the other applications available, but I haven’t yet found one that has all, or at least most, of these features.

Disadvantages of using Dreamweaver

On the other side of the coin there are aspects of Dreamweaver that I don’t like at all; aspects that were better in some of the other applications I tried.

1. The cost of Dreamweaver isn’t very inviting ($399 USD as of this writing.), but I suppose for all the features and abilities it comes with, the price might be justified. When compared to the other applications mentioned above, the cost is quite a turn off, there is no doubt about that.
2. The application consumes a lot of resources on my Mac. It opens slowly and generally slows down the overall speed of my Mac when a few other applications are also open. (I currently have a 1.6ghz G5 with 2gb of RAM). It doesn’t slow my Mac down to an unbearable point, but I do notice a difference.

That, in a nutshell, is my experience with Dreamweaver and the reasons why I choose to use it over many other popular text editors out there. I’m very open-minded and am more than willing to try other text editors that will work on OS X. If you know of an application that has all of the features I mentioned above, please let me know and I’ll take it for a test drive.