But none of them does everything - such as easily compiling, post-processing, concatenating, minifying and previewing, all together - not even with plugins. Others might even allow you to run autoprefixer over the compiled file. Some editors can compile your LESS files, for instance, as you save them. Most editors have plugins that allow you to do some processing, using languages like LESS, Jade, Coffeescript, etc. It is, therefore, extremely important for us to choose tools that make it easy for us to work with these languages and technologies - ie., to be able to process these files automatically, applying post-processing tools like AutoPrefixer, as well as concatenating and minifying the files, as we save them - and seeing those changes live, on multiple browsers and devices, as we make them. These days, every single project we do uses LESS, as well as UI frameworks like UIKit, and javascript libraries like Vue and Velocity. Ultimately, for me more important than the Editor was choosing the right pre+post-processing tools. But it does not have as many plugins as the others, and power users often end up moving on to more customisable editors. Coda, on the other hand, is fantastic for the beginner: beautiful interface, super easy customisation, loads of bundled tools - even the complete set of documentation on HTML/CSS/JS/PHP is built right into the program. When you eventually do, it’s a powerhouse. Expect to spend months adding and fine-tuning plugins, to get it to work exactly the way you want it - and to learn all of its keyboard shortcuts.
Sublime, for instance, is by far the fastest, and most extensible, but the interface is truly horrendous: all configuration has to be done via a myriad of text files, using raw JSON. They all have drawbacks, and they all have their strengths.
It has loads of useful features that make it stand out from the rest.Īs far as Mac editors and IDEs go, I’ve tried most of them: BBEdit, TextMate, Sublime Text, Atom, Espresso, Smultron, SubEthaEdit, Coda, and Brackets. IMHO, the best Markdown editor - which you probably never heard of - is the amazing LightPaper. Having a good Markdown editor was essential for me, and I spent a lot of time doing research and testing several of them out - on the Mac. In our projects, we write our spec files in Markdown - most platform-agnostic way to do it, as everyone uses different types of computers.