WEBEXPEDITION18 Never Stop The Exploring

When it comes to web design every designer have their own favorite coding application. Mac users have plenty of options to choose from. This roundup of HTML and CSS editors brings the most popular editing apps with a brief overview of their features.
Let’s take a look at what should (or could) be on your hard drive if you’re serious about creating websites.

Many of these editors mix design and coding functionality, appealing both to beginners and advanced users.

Coda ($99)

Coda by Panic has a fantastic site/project manager, offers free Subversion support, has a truly amazing find and replace function – not to mention the live preview and the ability to visually edit your CSS.
Coda is one of the most popular choices for Mac based Web Designers.

Espresso ($79)

With a wonderfully minimal interface, Espresso turbo-charges your workflow with the perfect blend of features. Speed through day-to-day edits with extensive language support, contextual completions, powerful smart snippets, and Zen actions.
Watch your web pages update in real time with live styling, visualize and inspect your layouts with X-ray, then push the changes to your server with Sync or Quick Publish. Oh, and CSSEdit 3 is built in!

Dreamweaver ($399)

Dreamweaver may very well be the most powerful web editor available. It not only comes with code completion and subversion support, but it also allows for CSS validation with a few clicks and, as of CS5, Dreamweaver also supports authoring and testing of content management systems like Joomla or WordPress.

BBEdit ($39.99)

BBEdit is the leading professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh. An intelligent interface provides easy access to BBEdit’s best-of-class features, including grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files, project definition tools, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages, code folding, FTP and SFTP open and save, AppleScript, Mac OS X Unix scripting support, text and code completion, and of course a complete set of robust HTML markup tools.

HyperEdit ($25)

Tumult HyperEdit is a lightweight HTML editor with a preview pane that displays the web page live as you type. HyperEdit breaks the tedious cycle of writing html, saving the file, then reloading and viewing the page in the browser by combining the writing phase with the viewing phase.

skEdit ($29.99)

skEdit is another lightweight coding app that can be easily extended with more language support. The application includes project support, code completion, snippets and live preview, so it’s definitely a good competitor to the more wider known options.

Taco HTML Edit ($24.99)

Taco HTML Edit is designed to simplify the process of creating attractive web sites that render correctly in various browsers. Taco HTML Edit includes tag wizards, which generate HTML markup for you. Taco HTML Edit also helps find errors in your HTML markup, and it can even check spelling in your documents. For those people who use PHP scripts in their development, Taco HTML Edit includes tools for PHP management.

TextMate ($55)

TextMate brings Apple’s approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.
It is incredibly adaptable and brings powerful snippet support and macros as well as a wealth of other features.

Flux (£69.99)

The closest Mac equivalent to Dreamweaver might be Flux by The Escapers. If you are looking for an app that allows you to develop both in visual and code view but can’t afford Dreamweaver, give Flux a try. The interface is very sleek and, once the basic principles of the app are understood, professional websites can be quickly created using both editing environments.

Authored by Nikola Lazarevic

Web Designer, Blogger, M.Sc in Electronic Engineering from Nis, Serbia. Founder of webexpedition18.com. You can find me on Twitter.