Best free/cheap web design app

[bbloke]

I know a lot of people use Dreamweaver, and I have played a bit with GoLive (not extensively) in the past. More recently, I've been doing a little bit of hand-coding, and I've been using SubEthaEdit (the free version, although there no longer is one...). I was wondering what free or cheap editors people prefer.

1. iWeb
2. RapidWeaver
3. Nvu
4. Sandvox
5. skEdit
6. TextWrangler
7. Taco HTML Edit
8. SubEthaEdit
9. jEdit
10. HyperEdit

Honorable mentions (I can only put 10 options in a poll!):

• Shutterbug
• Goldfish
• Smultron

 

[nixgeek]

I have been using Nvu for a while now. I'm not a web developer, but I needed something that was open source and flexible. The Mozilla Composer wasn't doing it for me any longer and I didn't want to spend the money on something like Dreamweaver (which can be quite a pain to use if you're a novice website creator). Thankfully, Nvu came along and was available for all the major platforms. It brought to the table features that were seriously lacking in Composer.

My only issue with Nvu at the moment is the apparent stagnation of the project. It's been at 1.0 since late June of 2005 and it would seem like quite a long time to have one version of an app available for so long without any bugfixes at the very least. Thankfully, it looks as though development might pick up again but this rather inconsistent support makes me question Nvu's future.

Here's hoping maybe the Firefox team of some other team can pick up the project and run with it.

 

[billbaloney]

I don't know that TextWrangler, as well as some of these others, qualifies as a "web design" application. It's just a free, handy, well-made text editor.

 

[bbloke]

I don't know that TextWrangler, as well as some of these others, qualifies as a "web design" application. It's just a free, handy, well-made text editor.

Well, OK, I see what you are saying and take your point, but I know a fair number of people who recommend it as an editor/coding tool/etc. and use it for web design. So I thought I'd include it, as it is well known.

 

[bbloke]

Ooops, I should really explain the reasoning behind my choice too, as nixgeek has!

I chose SubEthaEdit as it is a simple editor that has a variety of nice touches, such as color coding the text, displaying line numbers, showing which section (eg. <div>) your cursor is currently in, block editing, and displaying a live preview (rather than needing a separate browser) as you edit web pages. There are lots of other features that are "bigger," such as sharing documents between coders, but which I don't necessarily use! I know a number of these features are present in other editors, but, for some reason, I've just really come to like the feel of SubEthaEdit.

 

[Trip]

SubEthaEdit is by far my favorite. I love the color coding, the preview, pretty much everything about it is perfect for me.

 

[twister]

Good topic as I'm wondering the same thing. I hate NVU as it doesn't do PHP and has FTP issues. I want to love it though.

Right now I'm using skEdit as it has code completion and built in FTP. So that gets my vote at the moment.