So I wanted to mention quickly that I went ahead and finally bought Coda. I have not been disappointed. It's pretty fabulous.
A couple minor things that bother me:
- When I'm working on a page that contains session values, and then I save that page, Coda auto-refreshes the page in the Preview window. But it loses the session data, forcing me to go back to the previous page and resubmit a form. This often makes previewing in another app — specifically, a browser — more convenient than staying in Coda.
- The Books section is nice, but sometimes the web is better. The web gives me examples that the books often lack, and Coda's book search is pretty lacking compared to Google; it does not appear to allow complex searches of the books.
Both these points lead to one inevitable conclusion: Guys, build a browser into Coda! Am I right?
On the plus side, I have made one joyous discovery: In Text Wrangler, my previous web-text editor, when you double-click a PHP variable only the letters get selected, not the variable symbol. Let me give an example. Let's say I have a variable called $cheesewiz. That variable is preceded by a dollar sign, which is a common way to denote variables. If I double-click that variable in TextWrangler, it does not select the dollar sign. This is fine, and has been the preferred behavior nearly every time I copy-paste. The Text Wrangler way (which seems to be the way most text editors handle such a thing) makes it just as easy to replace by hand everything in my document that says "cheesewiz" as it would be to replace all instances of "$cheesewiz", whereas if the behavior were reversed this would not be true.
In Coda, the default is to select the dollar sign when editing PHP code ("Double-clicking a PHP variable now includes the $ prefix once again"), which is fine too, and I understand the logic, it's just almost never what I want to happen. But I've recently discovered that in Coda — and this is really cool — if you double-click $cheesewiz and then, in one gesture-like fell swoop, move the mouse slightly to the right before letting go of the button, Coda will deselect the dollar-sign. So Coda actually gives you two ways to select variables: double-click to select the whole deal; double-click-jiggle to select only the variable text.
And that, my friends, is remarkably slick.
