Chris Wiegman
When I first switched to Mac about 3 years ago I initially had a hard time finding an editor I liked. I bounced around from TextWrangler, Aptana, NetBeans, and a few others before settling on Coda by Panic Software and, for a while at least, I was pretty much happy with it.
Fast forward 3 years later and not much has changed with Coda and therein lies the problem. The development and design world has changed and Coda hasn’t. When I first realized this over a year ago I didn’t think much of it. Panic’s blog talked about an upcoming update to the software that would make it fresh again and it was still working (although all the nuances that had popped up over the years had become somewhat annoying). I figured I would just wait a few weeks and Panic would just fix all of the problems that made Coda less-than-perfect for me. Well those weeks turned into months, those months turned into more than a year, and Panic has released major updated to everything but Coda (including a few brand new products). The writing was on the wall. It was time to find a new editor.
I spent most of the summer trying different software including Aptana and others I had tried before but nothing really seemed all that refined. Aptana had come a long way (in fact I keep it on all my computers as a secondary IDE) and NetbBeans has added some descent PHP integration but nothing really called out to me. Finally, a little over a month ago, MacRabbit released their newest editor, Espresso and it is everything that Coda isn’t. It’s fast, has a small resource Footprint, has code-folding and various other features to make writing code easier, made it easy to transfer projects between both of my computers and more. Basically, it did everything I initially loved about Coda as well as fixed all the annoyances I didn’t.
When you spend hours each day in an IDE or text editor the little things really add up. Start doing it for a living and $79 (the current price for an Espresso license) for a piece of software that can make your life easier really isn’t a big deal. Thank you Espresso for making my editor functional again!
Hello Espresso and so long Coda.