Sam-I-Am on Web Development

Sam Foster on the web and web-ish software developmen

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Call for help from a stranded Homesite user

Homesite - from Nick Bradbury, then Allaire, now Macromedia - has been my primary tool of the trade for oh many many years now. But its stalled out since Macromedia bought Allaire and starting to show its age. TopStyle Pro, Bradbury's latest offering looks great, and is hard to beat as a CSS editor, but CSS is only a part of what I do, and I'm not going to switch editor continually. It falls far short of Homesite as a HTML editor - no multi-line search/replace, ... I can stop there, thats a show stopper right away. And no scripting support - my Homesite is like a my workshop at this point, with custom tools for all kinds of tasks. I've started using Eclipse for some tasks, but wow its slow and clunky. For its extensibility API, Dreamweaver is hard to beat, but its another behemoth, and with an after-thought text editor. For its extensibility I also looked at JEdit, but its also slow and I dont have the java chops to create the tools and extensions I'd like. Ultra-edit looks good again. But I'd miss the easy scripting and (albeit limited) API Homesite gives me, the muti-line search/replace, the custom toolbars, the resource pane, search pane.. the list goes on. The same goes for most programmers text editors. But I'll take the columns mode editing, the better performance, better handling of large files. Html-Kit has some of it, but again not all. Looking across to the other side, BBEdit isn't going to do it either. I've even considered vi - steep learning curve and though I'm mostly a keyboard user, I'd eventually miss the gui. Where now? I'd switch platform for the right tool, but for now it looks like I'm stuck.

2 Comments:

At 6:58 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thought I was the only one :D

Latest Dreamweaver is almost "there", but still comes nowhere near Homesite 2.5.

Think I would still use it if it had supported UTF-8 :-)

 
At 8:25 AM, Blogger Sam-I-Am said...

Follow up: Actually UltraEdit now has good application scripting support using javascript, and a multi-line search/replace - so its looking pretty good.

Ironically I just switched to osx (for quite seperate reasons) where I'm getting to know TextMate. It works, but there's some missing and brain-dead bits to that too.

 

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