When I am writing PHP, I have settled on Sublime Text 2. (Why 2 and not 3? I have NO idea. It's just what someone suggested and I haven't bothered to upgrade.) I was using TextPad, but I like the syntax highlighting and some of the editing features (Multi-select, for example) that Sublime Text has. Seriously, if you do any coding, you'll fall in LOVE with this editor!
When I'm coding new pages, I find myself starting with some plain text boilerplate, and putting in my styles and what-not to make it look the way I want. But, sometimes I want a mouse driven interface. This is especially true when I am editing some really old site that I haven't taken the time to re-factor, and it's layout is tables nested inside nested tables... A good WYSIWYG editor can help dig through the clutter. That being said, I didn't have such an editor on my developing machine, so I went looking for one today. I did very quick tests on a couple. I started with an ancient version of FPXpress. I had messed with it years ago, and I have experience with it's big brother, MS Frontpage. I couldn't get it to open my PHP files, and when I just created a blank file to mess with, it just didn't feel right. There's probably an issue with that dinosaur on a newer system. (Win7)
Next, I tried PageBreeze. If I remember correctly, it choked on my PHP file as well. When I started a blank document I tried my litmus test for any mouse driven HTML editor: Create a table. A GUI HTML editor should provide a dragable grid where you can choose the number of rows and columns. This one gave a dialog box to type (or select with increment / decrement buttons) the number of each. UNINSTALL
Then, I tried amaya, from w3c. Still not happy (similar to what I experienced with PageBreeze) UNINSTALL
THEN another search revealed that MS has made Expression Web 4 available for free. I know, I know; I expect it to make UGLY code, but FINALLY the GUI does what I expect it to. If the code is too bad, I can tweak it after the fact. The job that sent me on this chase was pulling a nested table out of one document to use in another similar one. It was a good way to ensure the formatting of the two documents would match. Could I have done it in a text editor? Sure! Would it have been faster than finding a new editor? Almost certainly. But, in the long run, I think it was worth it.
I do miss "CRTL + /" from Frontpage, (Show tags) but there's a decent alternative where the current cursor focus generates a breadcrumb style tag list at the top of the page, in nesting order. That makes it easy to select children and parents of a given element.
Where is this legacy code?
On a page all about outdoor advertising:
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