Decaflon Thread: Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

Rizza — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 22:42:52

Coda didn't really impress me all that much either. I prefer to develop my PHP in Zend Studio and everything else in TextMate then Transmit for FTP.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

tekkie — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 23:44:56

No expierence of Coda but Transmit is definitely a very good product by Panic.
Preference: TextWrangler/Transmit.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

jchristopher — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:38:37

I'll be honest -- I've since started using Coda full time. After forcing myself to use the built in preview it really works out quite nicely. A slick DOM inspector with console.log and you're well on your way. I'm dying for a more elaborate snippet system, though. Currently there are Clips, and they're little more than that. I'd like some multi-tab triggers on a per-Clip basis. I think they'll be coming down the pipe though.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

JoeLencioni — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:42:14

@RightOn: what about EMACS? There is a learning curve, but it is very powerful. Here's a decent screencast.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

Eyenovation — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 10:41:35

It's still version 1. Panic, to their credit, has always done good work. I'm sure updates will be on the way.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

Mike — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 09:25:51

Damn is the Smultron interface ugly or what. Those hideous rainbow icons at the top of the window would piss me off all day long.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

glenndavid — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 09:10:40

yet again, Smultron is the lost artefact you are all looking for, i use it all the time, no text-lag (i didn't know that even existed with all these uber-powerfull machines, can't even handle keyboard input anymore??)

it will do all you highlighting and everything, please do chekc it out, version has been released and this dude really make smultron a nice IDE to work in...

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

arthus — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 01:14:31

Actually, I am enjoying Coda very much. Primarily this is because my testing server is not on my local machine. With Coda, I just set up the site and edit files directly from ftp... command-s saves it back to server.
Of course, I just recently switched to a Mac so I have yet to test all the options.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

Rich — Sat, 19 May 2007 20:10:57

I used InType in the brief time between it being released and me switching to Mac. It's quite nice.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

RightOn — Sat, 19 May 2007 20:08:09

I have to say, InType is quite nice.

I've tried (jokingly) to get the developer for CSSEdit to allow someone to maintain a PC port of his app and he just laughs.

If only I could convince my boss to let me use a Mac @ work...

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

ryanarrowsmith — Sat, 19 May 2007 16:46:25

I wasn't a fan of Coda. Too bloated, and so was the price.

I use Textmate, Cyberduck (free!) and CSSEdit. I tried the CSS in textmate, it's nowhere near as impressive as CSSedit.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

alexsuraci — Sat, 19 May 2007 03:23:33

RightOn: I'm going to suggest Intype myself. It's another TextMate-for-Windows type thing, but the thing is, it is actually a very good "port" from what I've tested.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

peroty — Sat, 19 May 2007 02:17:40

@RightOn.

e-texteditor makes the claim of being like textmate for Windows, but I've never used it. And the only thing I can think of that comes anywhere near close to CSSEdit is Style Master.
But you've probably already seen them so I'm just rehashing history.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

RightOn — Sat, 19 May 2007 01:35:37

I only wish there was something even CLOSE to on par with CSSEdit/TextMate/Transmit for Windows.

I've LOOKED and LOOKED and tried and I can't do it.

I spend my days @ work coding in crappy apps saving my files to my USB drive so I can take them home and work on them on my Mac.

Anyone?

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

Alan — Sat, 19 May 2007 01:24:28

Setting up two panes side by side--one code, one preview--with instant rendering on save is pretty darn useful, IMHO.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

ttscoff — Fri, 18 May 2007 22:45:38

I bought Coda for one of my interns. I think it's great for people who don't want to bother learning TextMate. Myself, I've written a ton of customizations for TextMate (including the Wordpress bundle) and would have a really hard time separating myself from it. I've written fairly lengthy complaints about Coda elsewhere, but I agree with most of what's been said here. In short, it's like a combo TV/VCR. It doesn't do either job as well as individual pieces do separately, and it really doesn't offer that much more convenience in most situations.

In response to the question about CSSEdit in combination with TextMate. Despite having written some of the workflow enhancement commands for TextMate, I still find working in the code view of CSSEdit with the Live Preview faster and more intuitive at this point. TextMate 2.0 may change a few things, but the X-Ray feature of CSSEdit is going to be hard to top.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

jlaakso — Fri, 18 May 2007 22:07:18

So far Coda's been very good for me. I do simple updates to existing sites and barebones HTML work, really makes things feel easier to manage.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

jchristopher — Fri, 18 May 2007 20:08:16

I tested out both Coda and TextMate/CSSEdit/Transmit starting at the same time, and I've settled on TextMate/CSSEdit/Transmit due to many of the same reasons as stated above. Some of the work I do is in ColdFusion, for which Coda doesn't have highlighting, so that was a major barrier from the start. It also seemed to spiral out of control as far as usability was concerned. As I would work in a larger project it was slightly difficult to distinguish which pane had what in it. I couldn't get the 'live' preview working properly for some reason or another and it was slightly disappointing that it only previewed when you save.

To answer jmathias' question re: CSSEdit: I've embraced it basically for the live preview. Although I work in a local development environment, not having to switch from code to browser and then refresh repeatedly is attractive to me. CSSEdit updates your preview as you type, making my styling process go that much quicker. I haven't quite embraced the milestones feature yet, but plan on it as I think it should come in handy. I only use it when I'm styling a design from the start though. For quick and dirty CSS I stick with TextMate as it is just more convenient.

TextMate is a completely fantastic editor hands down, and Transmit is pretty sweet as well. So I'm pretty sure I'll be sticking with that trio as opposed to Coda any time soon, even if it offers the highlighting I'm looking for in the future.

Also FYI: it is possible to have a 'code view' in Coda for CSS. Like others, I couldn't stand applying styles using a plethora of dropdowns and text fields.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

jackosh — Fri, 18 May 2007 19:48:16

I'm very surprised to see all of this negativity following Coda (after all of the hype). I figured it would quickly become the "choice" software!

At first, I was jealous because I couldn't use it. I still am, but just now quite as jealous!

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

joeylomanto — Fri, 18 May 2007 19:22:40

I agree CODA is totally useless for me.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

RightOn — Fri, 18 May 2007 18:33:00

I use CSSEdit for it's milestones and for it live preview.

I also need a BIT more help with the CSS side of things so it helps to have autocomplete and live preview to see what I'm messing up.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

dhollister — Fri, 18 May 2007 06:10:53

Coda is certainly not great for building apps from scratch, but what Coda is incredible for is maintanence of existing sites -- especially if you have a lot of them.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

peroty — Fri, 18 May 2007 05:54:04

I use CSSEdit for the Milestones (versioning) mainly. I use Textwrangler instead of Textmate, am I missing out?

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

jmathias — Fri, 18 May 2007 05:38:06

sweet, thanks Brad!

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

joenewbreed — Fri, 18 May 2007 05:37:43

@jmathias: over here

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

jmathias — Fri, 18 May 2007 03:54:40

Ooh where can I get the WordPress Bundles?

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

JPhill — Fri, 18 May 2007 03:50:39

jmathias, that's funny!

Has anyone used the Wordpress bundles for Textmate? They're pretty sweet.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

jmathias — Fri, 18 May 2007 03:45:48

Here's my experience.

I downloaded and installed Coda the day it was released, I app-zapped that bitch literally 5 minutes later.

I use Textmate, and Transmit, nothing else is needed.

I am curious as to why some folks use CSSEdit in addition to Textmate, as Textmate has Syntax highlighting and snippet support for CSS, why the extra program?

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

carmodyarc — Fri, 18 May 2007 02:42:21

I have Expose-ing through all my workspaces down to a science. Like Mike said, Coda feels like it just falls short of all it's non-bundled competitors.

I have run across one "all in one" .app that I think is the hawtness Forklift. It's a file manager / FTP client. One thing I missed from Windows was the two pane explorer window, Forklift has that thing beat every which way from Sunday. Check it out, it's still in a free beta period.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

JPhill — Fri, 18 May 2007 02:33:21

Yeah I really haven't used Code since the first week that it was released, though I did give it an honest run. Very cool concept, but still needs work. I work so much better in Textmate.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

Mike — Fri, 18 May 2007 02:18:35

Alex, totally agree man.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

alexsuraci — Fri, 18 May 2007 01:42:00

For Websites: Coda.
For Web Software: TextMate.

That sums up my usage nicely. Coda's syntax highlighting is horrid, in my opinion. It's all kinds of buggy. For me it only highlights closing tags, I have no idea why.

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

RightOn — Fri, 18 May 2007 00:47:38

I'm still getting used to hand coding and I feel MUCH more comfortable with my TextMate / CSSEdit / Transmit combo.

I've given Coda the good old college try but it's just not all that they claim it is...

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

peroty — Fri, 18 May 2007 00:43:42

That was my impression about it too. It's a nice thought for people who may not know how to hand code, or still not comfortable with it yet, but I don't see the real value over my TextWrangler/CSSEdit/Transmit combination.
Though, as of late is becoming more and more of a "Textpattern presentation tab" system. LOL
I'm curious to hear others thoughts on it, good or bad. :)

Coda Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

Mike — Fri, 18 May 2007 00:00:45

After I read all the hype surrounding Coda I figured it might be worth it to give the application a shot, since I'm one of those people who needs FTP, browser, and text editor open at all times of the day.

My first impressions were that it is very well-designed, but some of UI elements are over the top and non-Aqua standard like the tabbed toolbar at the top of the window. The site browser that takes screenshots of your sites was a nice touch, but again, not really necessary.

Problems I encountered with Coda that I was used to having with my current editor/FTP combination:

Syntax highlighting engine not as robust as TextMate or BBEdit. I did my best to replicate the TextMate highlighting settings I was used to but it never was exactly the same.
Buggy text editing, memory leak? Sometimes there'd be a noticable lag between when I typed a key and it appeared on the screen, something I never experienced with TextMate or BBEdit. Probably the biggest annoyance about Coda.
90% of the features are useless to me. The CSS editing would never get used because I hand-code everything (and know all CSS styles), and the book reference didn't interest me either. Google is a much more robust code reference than any book could ever be.
No recently accessed folders in FTP. One of the things I'm used to with Fetch is a dropdown that lets me directly hit recently accessed directories on the remote server. When I'm uploading images, CSS, and PHP files, they all go into different directories and it was a major pain in Coda because I always had to manually move up and down the directory structure to find the folder I needed.

It seems like in an effort to compact all their features into one application, they cut some corners in the little details that make all the difference when you use the application every single day. I'll stick with an editor + Fetch, they work perfectly fine and since I keep Fetch hidden during my work, the screen real estate the extra FTP application takes up never bothers me.