Cheap or free alternatives to Dreamweaver

June 27, 2012 3:22 PM

I'm looking for an alternative to Dreamweaver for Mac. I'm really interested only in the html-editing shortcuts.

I've been using Dreamweaver for years, but really only the html editing. The way it color-codes html, automatically closes tags, or pulls up a list of CSS elements when you need to insert one. Those simple features save me a lot of time over a text editor, but it occurs to me that Dreamweaver is probably overkill for my meager needs. What's the best lightweight alternative?

posted by roll truck roll to technology (9 answers total)

Coda 2 or Espresso?
posted by misterbrandt at 3:41 PM on June 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

Coda seems to be what you want.
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 3:43 PM on June 27, 2012

I'd agree that Coda is most likely what you are after: the most recent version takes up slightly more screen room with panels, but keeps very much to the spirit of "only the tools you need, and none that you don't". I much prefer it over DreamWeaver for most web development projects.

A visually stripped-down alternative, more focused on being an accessible text editor with greater customization features, would be Sublime Text 2 with the Zen Coding plugin and perhaps a few others (CloseTagOnSlash, for example).
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 4:01 PM on June 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

Coda is the bomb.com.
posted by primethyme at 4:03 PM on June 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

Keep an eye on Brackets, too.
posted by flabdablet at 4:15 PM on June 27, 2012

Coda is nice, but Sublime+Zen Coding is an absolute revelation.
posted by sixswitch at 6:51 PM on June 27, 2012

Emacs in HTML Helper mode. On OSX, Aquamacs is very nice. Has the advantage of working the same on any platform you happen to be on, including remote ssh only logins for those oncall times, but requires more customisation. It's free.
posted by lundman at 7:23 PM on June 27, 2012

Do you ever edit with the design view in DreamWeaver?
There are lots of great HTML editors with Preview options, but if you want to edit text on the page (WYSIWYG) rather than in code view, I'm not aware of anything but DreamWeaver which can do that.
posted by Lanark at 1:24 PM on June 28, 2012

Thanks a lot, everyone.

At first glance, either Coda or Sublime Text + Zen Coding seem like exactly what I'm looking for. I'll download the trials of both and see what sticks.

Do you ever edit with the design view in DreamWeaver?

Not really. I hardly ever look at things in the WYSIWYG, as it never quite looks like it will on the browser anyway. I'm really just looking for the little auto shortcuts when editing html/css.

Thanks again.
posted by roll truck roll at 1:19 AM on June 29, 2012