Getting to Know Coda: Sites and General Editing
Following Coda’s suggested workflow, my experience initially began with defining “Sites.” Much like it’s clumsy, overweight cousin Dreamweaver, Coda uses Sites to organize each web project. Each site has a list of useful properties which are applied to file transfer, local preview, and SSH components. As I exepected, Coda was smart enough to take a peek at the Favorites I defined in Transmit and then offer to import them into it’s own workspace.
Since I wanted to give Coda a real chance at survival, I decided to try to use it at it’s full potential. So I set up a local preview server which mimics the remote server’s configuration (AMP) and promptly began downloading the site. It took me a moment to figure out how to do that as I tried the (what seems to me) logical approach by selecting the remote files and dragging them onto the Local tab. Evidently that’s not the way Coda does business. I had to right-click and choose download to make a local copy of the site. As this was downloading, a Transmit-inherited annoyance came forth when it encounters a file it does not have read access to: it aborts the transfer.
While editing, I didn’t notice too many things that irked me. I did expect to chance a few defaults to those which I tend to prefer while editing. In case you are wondering, I enabled line numbers, disabled tabs, turned off line wrapping, and smoothed the terminal font.
Here’s today’s list of discoveries:
Good Stuff
- One-click publishing of changed files.
- Using the stored password for SSH is genius.
- I also noticed that upon logging in with SSH, it automatically changes to the remote directory you set up in the site’s configuration.
- Tooltips pop up over files explaining where they will be uploaded on the server when they are in queue. This behavior is further clarified when you hit the Publish All button: a summary window pops itemizing each file and their destinations.
Annoyances
- It doesn’t recognize .thtml files.
This was quickly avoided by discovering Custom Syntax Modes in the Editor Settings within Coda’s Preferences. - Syntax coloring sucks. It doesn’t update well, it freaks out with PHP nested in HTML attributes, and single quotes in HTML mode throw off PHP’s coloring. I believe this to stem from the lack of true contexts like in Textmate. With this in mind, I can only assume the problem carries over to other multi-context documents like RoR + HTML.
- Underscores are not recognized as a word boundary
- The phrase “Use Tabs” in preferences may be a little confusing. I’m sure someone, somewhere mistook this by meaning that files would be opened in a new window instead of a tab. I suggest rephrasing it to read, “Use tabs to indent text.”
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