Hey everyone 
I’m new to web design, have been learning for about 12 months now and have always used dreamweaver to design and code, but I read a recent post explaining that employers tend not to favour designers that use dreamweaver. So I am here asking what Is the best text editor, I use an Apple Mac if that makes any difference?
Are there any benefits to using a text editor?
Thanks in advance
That statement can easily be misinterpreted. It probably means “using Dw as a WYSIWYG tool—that is, using Design View rather than code view.” Dw is a perfectly good (actually, excellent) code editor. The important thing is that you can code. The tool you use is totally irrelevant. It’s like saying you should use Brand A hammer rather than Brand B. The important thing is that you can drive nails.
That said, there are lots of great code editors out there, like SublimeText2, Coda2, Textmate, NetBeans etc. I made a list of them here a while ago.
When beginners use DW, they tend to use the design view because they can’t write code.
They tend to use word processor techniques, such as making fonts larger for headers instead of using h tags, highlight text to apply a colour or font instead of using css styles, and they probably can’t even spell css. This leads to really bad code. Which then makes people who use windows’ notepad “because it is just an editor” blame DW rather than these users’ total lack of knowledge. (Anyone using notepad instead of a real editor is missing lots of benefits provided by a real editor. But hey! they work with raw code so they must be good…) Hence some “elite” coders (elite in their minds any way) will tell you DW produces really bad code. No, it produces the code you tell it to produce.
It’s not the tool you use but how you use it that matters. If you write code using DW, it’s your code that matters. Don’t let the arrogance of those who use a simple text editor distract from this point.
At the interview for my current contract, which finishes this week, they opened Dreamweaver, opened a file in the coding view and said what does this do (admittedly it was PHP, but interspersed with html). If you can answer that question, the tool displaying the code is almost irrelevant.
Thanks for your response.
I hardly use the “Design View” in Dreamweaver anymore as I have started to understand the importance of testing website in different browser environments. This is one of the reasons why I would like to move to a text editor rather than a WYSIWYG piece of software.
Does anyone have any reviews on text editors that they have used on an Apple? Or does the operating system not really matter?
Thanks in advance
It matters in that some of the editors are only available for one platform or the other, but apart from that, it doesn’t matter. Textmate was the favorite Mac one for years, with Coda pretty popular too. But at the moment, SublimeText2 is the popular one … and it has the advantage of working on Mac and Windows.
One that is gaining ground as it develops is Brackets by Adobe, which is also a cross platform app. It’s not finished yet, but even in its current evolution it is pretty nice and is promising a lot.
Text Wrangler is free version of text editor for mac operating system.
BBEdit,SubEthaEdit and other are paid but good text editor.
sanjay
[ot]
Yup, and I would like computers to apply electric shock treatment to people who do this in word processors as well. The hours I waste because people won’t even use Heading 1/2/3 styles, let alone anything more complicated, and instead insist on using effectively inline formatting in Word, causing absolute chaos left, right and centre, are beyond counting.[/ot]