I’m the Euphoric frickin’ Llama.

I’ve been using Coda, Panic’s beautiful Mac web development IDE, to code up all my sites for a while now, including this blog, and while I think it’s very good, you tend to notice things in software when you use it a lot. Things you don’t particularly like, issues you feel shouldn’t be there and bugs that haven’t been fixed in far too long. There hasn’t been a patch for Coda in a while, so I’m hoping they’re working on something big, but I’m hoping even more that they include most of this list in their next update.

So, let’s go through them all. There’s some big ones and some tiny ones, but I figure I should get them all out. I’ve just been using Coda for several hours, so hopefully they’re pretty fresh in my mind.

1. PHP breaks syntax highlighting. First and foremost, Coda will expect PHP file to start with PHP, and starts it off in PHP-highlighting mode, despite the fact that PHP (for the web at least; I’m not sure about PHP-CLI) always starts in printing mode. This means any HTML up to a <?php opening statement will be highlighted as if it were PHP. In addition, any PHP code in a highlighted area of HTML (for example, in a tag attribute: <a href="<?= $link ?>">) will reset the HTML highlighting and screw it up. Interestingly enough, it also thinks a // comment continues until the end of the line; actually, if there’s a closing PHP tag (?>) it stops there.
2. Coda has a very annoying bug where it thinks a self-closing XML tag (for example, <br />) is actually an opening XML tag (<br>). This makes the Close Tag function close it, and will also break Close Tag tag blocks it’s nested in, no matter how far you go.
3. There is no prettyprinter. Now, I realise, this is more of a feature request than a complaint, but I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve downloaded or been passed a horribly-formatted HTML, XML or JavaScript page and needed to understand why line 326 is breaking so I can fix it. What am I supposed to do: buy BBEdit as well? C’mon… if you can do tag-matching, this is just one more step.
4. The folder tree forgets. If I close Coda and come back to it, or accidentally double-click on a folder and have to hit Back, I shouldn’t have to navigate (waiting for my slow web server to load each folder) through that mangled mess of directories that Joomla forces upon you. It should remember where I last was, damnit.
5. Bracket matching doesn’t extend to tags. If I want to find the opening partner to a closing brace, Coda is awesome. If I want to find the opening partner to a closing </div> tag, it’s not.
6. CSS mode doesn’t support rule indentation. CSS, despite the CSS creators’ apparent efforts to the contrary, is implicitly a hierarchical language, as it is essentially a set of rules defining presentation of HTML. Therefore, indentation of rules according to their equivalent HTML tag blocks is very useful to visually separate groups of rules. In my CSS, I like to indent a rule if the one before it refers to a parent HTML tag, but CSS mode in Coda doesn’t support creating these indents or any markers separating groups of rules. It does, however, preserve them if they’re inserted in Edit mode, which is a definite benefit. And this brings me onto another point:
7. CSS mode has its flaws. Edit mode has fantastic autocompletion capabilities for CSS, but they’re nowhere to be seen in CSS mode. I’d expect that with the comparatively rigid layout, you could even do things like highlight potentially invalid code. And interestingly enough, if your CSS file doesn’t end with a newline, any rule you create and move will join its ending brace to the start of the next selector - probably just a bug, but definitely an annoying one when you discover it.
8. The books are useless. Outdated, hard to read, irritatingly structured and only available when you’re connected to the Internet… what’s the point? Just link me to the specs online, thanks.
   Actually, there’s a point…
9. It needs a global and site-specific bookmarks menu. Coda has a web browser built in. I don’t like typing long URLs constantly. The mathematics is simple.
   This is one of a few reasons I don’t use Coda’s Preview mode - I just use Firefox. The others include the Google search box and the Web Developer toolbar.

That’s it. I realise that’s a fairly long list, but I think it speaks highly of an application that I can use it for up to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week at times and I can only name nine things that are wrong with it. I spent ten minutes racking my brains for a number ten and couldn’t think of a single thing. In contrast, I can think of several dozen things, off the top of the my head, that are right with it.

I believe Coda is a solid product - in fact, I was so impressed with it that bought it within a day of trialing it. I’m a student: that 40 quid could buy me twenty beers. That’s a lot. I just think it’s nine steps short of perfect.

Tags: coda, web-development

This entry was posted on Monday 31st March, 2008 and is filed under Coding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.