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.)