I like Dreamweaver. It does a lot, and though the interface is sometimes a bit unintuitive, I’ve found that learning Flash has taught me how much worse it could have been… ;)
Yeah, Flash sucks even worse. Macromedia simply doesn’t seem to have much of a clue about how to design a UI.
Can I get a link for eclipse?
I think you get the best results from using a text editor. CSS doesn’t map very well to WYSIWYG.
Eclipse getting good word of mouth… even Oreilly is getting in the picture :)
— Alan
I have a few minor complaints with Eclipse, but compared to DW it’s like moaning that your supermodel girlfriend has a birthmark on her left butt cheek.
My complaints:
[ul]
[li]3.1 is much nicer, but some of the plugins (notably, PHPEclipse) haven’t been updated. I imagine this will be rectified.
[/li][li]Wonky incremental search support. It’s not like Emacs or MSVC’s incremental search, it just acts real, real strange. As you type in stuff, if you hit backspace, it actually backspaces your text instead of your incremental search string. And if you start another incremental search, it retains the old string, so you have c-G to clear out the search buffer.
[/li][li]Big and slow. I’ve got 768MB and at times it seems like that’s not enough, so I’m upgrading to 1GB (the most my laptop can handle) to see if that helps, but it’s constantly swapping right now.
[/li][li]Somewhat quirky interface, but I’m slowly getting it.
[/li][/ul]
Are you using the Web Tools Plugins or anything like that? Or just straight Eclipse? (which I’m downloading right now to try out)
No, just PHPEclipse – well, I WAS using PHPEclipse until I upgraded to 3.1 and PHPEclipse stopped working.
Realistically the only thing that I needed from DW was its SFTP-based synchronization, and since I finally unassed myself and wrote a shell script to call rsync, I don’t need that anymore.
So what I do is edit and test locally (I have Apache 2/PHP5 running on my laptop) and when I’m ready to push it live, I just go into my Cygwin shell and do:
$ ./push.sh
Which rsyncs some directories using ssh and I’m golden.
All the other stuff in DW like WYSIWYG, references, etc. are pretty much useless since it’s easier to Google/search php.net than it is to use the shitty DW documentation browser.
I’m sorry – Notepad is a CRAPPY TEXT EDITOR. Sure, I can dig making your own website, but for the love of god, get a good text editor that supports syntax highlighting and other features.
Notepad2 is nice.
And free.
I use Eclipse for embedded C/C++ development (all the major embedded guys are switching to it because they don’t have to make an IDE).
It is a resource hog.
I’m sorry – Notepad is a CRAPPY TEXT EDITOR. Sure, I can dig making your own website, but for the love of god, get a good text editor that supports syntax highlighting and other features.
Notepad2 is nice.
And free.
http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html[/quote]
Can also try UltraEdit, which is cheap. Some people still use Macromedia’s old Homesite as well.
— Alan
I use TextEdit for text editing. Still fairly simple, but much better than notepad. Costs $30.
I just use VS as a text editor because I use it for my other humble dev needs, and I don’t want to install more editors. It also got a WYSIWYG editor, but like others of its ilk - it sucks.