Review: Coda

I’m a big fan of the Mac-only developers that have released programmer tools over the past few years. OmniGroup makes OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner, two applications that are open in my tray more often than they’re closed. I feel the same way about Panic’s suite off applications, esp. Transport. The interfaces are FAR easier to use

Coda is Panic’s latest application, and is a text editor aimed at making web development easier. I have been a vim user for ages, but in a terminal window — I don’t like VIM’s gui for whatever reason. I’ve tried Dreamweaver, gVim, BBedit, TextMate, … just about everything under the sun, but I still keep coming back to vim. Coda has some improvements on all of these, but also some things that annoy the everloving heck out of me.

First off, the code completion is set to automatic all the time. That’s fine by me when I’m coding — but when I’m writing comments or documentation inside my PHP files, I’d like the autocomplete to stop. I had to switch the mode in preferences so that I’d hit f5 or esc to cue the autocompleter. This is a stupidly simple feature and I’m surprised that Panic, well known for promoting ease of use and fine-tuning the tiniest things about their interface, couldn’t see that this is annoying as all hell.

Second, Coda doesn’t take into account that a lot of web developers these days use source code management like subversion. Without the ability to integrate with subversion, the whole change management and upload thing is of limited functionality. I don’t *use* FTP.

The sharing feature is kind of a cool concept, but I didn’t really get to check it out… it would’ve been nice in the last office I was in where I was working with other developers on a site.

With the heavy framework-based development that I do, it would be nice if Coda had something akin to TextMate’s pluggable modules. I had a Symfony module that worked great, and I’ve written an autocomplete file for Zend for vim. But I can’t find a place to define additional words for the autocomplete functionality in Coda.

I wish I could find something positive to say about Coda besides “It’s a good website editor”, but I can’t really find anything that’s exceptional or unusual about it that I would use. Which frustrates me, because I love Panic and want to say great things about their products. Coda just doesn’t address the advanced needs of a developer who’s doing modern, industrial-strength PHP development… you’re going to need Vim with some customizations or TextMate for those features.