I haven’t tested the demo, because I don’t like to install demos and betas of programs that I might like but won’t be able to buy right away, so I don’t know how it manages ISO-8859-1 files (the editor is based on SubEthaEdit, which seems to handle them — I’ve never liked SubEthaEdit, but I’m willing to admit that the engine is worthy if Panic chose it), but there’s just one reason Coda is probably not for me:
What is Coda? The easiest way to sum it up is this: One Window Web Development.
That’s exactly what I don’t want.
First, I make extensive use of the spatial Finder. That was one of the Mac’s biggest strengths from the start, and Apple was rightly pressured into reinstating it in OS X. All my web development folders are in single-window tree view; the most important subfolders open out of the tree into separate windows, and so on — while image folders use thumbnails icons, of course.
Why would I want to go back to a single, fixed list? With no thumbnails and no labels, as far as I can see?
Second, I like Exposé a lot. I don’t get people’s obsession with tabs — it’s not what works best on the Mac. Okay, it makes sense in Safari (especially with the option to open bookmark folders in a set of tabs) or NetNewsWire (where I routinely have thirty pages open at once, that I intend to read when I get the time), but I don’t see the point of generalizing them to every app. I don’t use tabs in Adium; I do in iTerm, but only because I like its bookmark functionality, and I don’t think there’s an easy way to deactivate tabs.
The Mac is all about separate windows; why would you want to restrict yourself to tabs and view splitters when you could arrange windows freely and see them all at a glance in Exposé? Remember when you used to laugh at Windows’ MDI (Multiple Document Interface) windows, before someone invented tabs to alleviate that system’s flaws.
I can’t find the quote where either Cabel or Stevenf (yeah, I realize Stevenf isn’t his name) says that Coda is aimed at web developers who use a text editor plus Transmit.
But that’s the point. Between AppleScript and the BSD core, OS X has the great advantage over Windows of being able to implement the Unix philosophy: you can be most efficient by tailoring your own workflow from separate, specialized apps.
All I have to do is hit a hotkey in TextWrangler and Transmit starts uploading in the background the file I was editing. Then I can use Exposé to locate Safari and hit Cmd-R. That might be one or two mouse presses more than with Coda (although I’m not sure it is), but using a one-window environment would mean losing too much functionality.
Plus, if I wanted to, I could modify my AppleScript to automatically switch to Safari and refresh the frontmost window when upload is complete.
I could have two separate shortcuts — one that only uploads, one that uploads and refreshes Safari once the Transmit queue is empty.
Hmm, I have to look into that.
And that’s the power of OS X. (And, yes, a great deal of it is thanks to Panic’s Transmit.)
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