Sunday, April 10, 2016

Editor Conundrum

VI, Pico, NotePad++, HomeSite, ColdFusion Studio, DreamWeaver, Eclipse, CFBuilder, Atom, Brackets, Sublime 2/3, and on and on...

I've used them all.  Some are specific to the OS and never go away (VI,Pico), some become so aged that you must toss, and others you just keep around.    There's never a perfect blend, those with that one feature that you'll need to go back to.   Sometimes you're in code mode, where it's all about the language your working in, code completion, snippets, color syntax, and then there's the visual side, where you need to make a change and see the result.

The progression of HomeSite -> ColdFusion Studio, switching to Dreamweaver, then to Eclipse with the cfeclipse plugin.  The shift to eclipse was primarily because I had switched from the type of employment (working for a software manufacturer) where the the perks of free software dried up.  Forking out over a hundred bucks for an editor often leads to a do-with-out approach on some features.  Yes, I'm cheap that way.

With Eclipse, I have the various configurations for Java, PHP, and ColdFusion.  But as with anything Eclipse is a bit persnickety and often hangs with that awful opaque white overlay as it's trying to do something and you HOPE it comes back.  You end up having to turn off many features that you find useful when the files you're editing have more lines they they probably should have.

Recently I did fork out $70 for Sublime, which was under my $100 think about it threshold.  It's fast, extensible, styles well.   A very good editor.  I added a plugin to launch a browser, all well and good.

But I wanted more....

I wanted side by side live preview for a particular bit of code I was working with.  I performed a small search for live preview, but it's all about opening up a new browser window which it happily does on my other screen that I'm multi-tasking on, right on top of everything.

Well, I've also happen to have Atom installed, which is chromium based. I search for live preview and Ding Goes the Bell!



So for the current task of the day, I'm switching to Atom.  Once I go back into pure code mode, Sublime takes over again.
  

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