Any handcoders here?

I am a vi-wimp, so I use emacs or Xemacs. I am too simple minded to understand all these other crazy "programming environments"....

 

Oh man... emacs is rocket science.

What other text editor makes you learn Lisp to use it?

 

BBEdit lite for me. My wife would KILL me if I paid for development tools!

I code by hand mostly out of habit by now. I tried learning NVU, but why bother with any learning curve when I can just do it with minimal fuss in code?

 

Fascinating thread! Interesting with all the Linux boys wading in. I remember having to use emacs to write Java on thin clients to a Sun box back in the first year - horrible IMHO... I discovered EditPlus shortly after and (like quite a few in this thread) use it for all my coding needs. I have Visual Studio and Dreamweaver installed, but rarely use Dreamweaver and only use VS for my larger projects as it does have pretty good class management features, plus great integration with the MSDN.

Couple of comments:

Those people who are touting DW / FW for their automatic code generation functionality are missing the point - if you're having to generate code, your site should be dynamic anyway.

Since i've moved across to pure CSS layouts, hand coding seems to be the only way to go. I think that the WYSIWYG boys are going to struggle to bring out an editor that creates good CSS layout code combined with decent XHTML. Dreamweaver is great for putting together a table quickly, but it's much quicker to create a CSS layout by hand. Haven't tried the new version yet though - anyone got it?

Textpad is also a nice editor. Notepad's out - that's just too hardcore - who ever passes up syntax highlighting and autocompletion!!

Just my 2p,

Jamie

 

I'm probably stirring the pot here...

But aren't there better uses of your time than coding by hand? I mean really...

 

Stir away , I'm biting!

IMHO there are better uses of my time than webdesign full stop. The firm I work for has a regular designer we use to produce layouts. He creates them in a graphics package (usually a combination of Fireworks and Photoshop) and emails us the JPEGs until we're happy. Using a graphics package means that he has total creative freedom, and can make layouts very, very quickly. Once we're happy with his design, he provides me with a layered photoshop file.

I then use Photoshop / Fireworks to chop up the file and create a layout using those graphics and XHTML / CSS. This process is usually quick and painless, because I'm not making any design decisions. Making design decisions during the coding process is a big no-no if you want to work fast. With a fixed target to aim for, I write the code quite quickly, and then can use this as the basis for all the pages in the site.

If I'm creating a site for myself, I will still create a tracing image either in a graphics package or on paper.

WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver try to combine this process into one step, with generally terrible results. Granted, not all websites created with Dreamweaver are bad, but because it's WYSIWYG, you're always going to be tempted to make little changes here and there, and keep fiddling with your site.

If you want to get things done, feature locking is vital, otherwise you'll get stuck in an endless loop

It's not like you'd start writing code without mapping out your classes and functions first, so I don't understand why people do when they're creating websites!

Sorry I've just read this over and i'm getting a bit heated - any offence was entirely unintended

 

I personally love "Zend studio" ( am a PHP coder ).

 

Actually I rather hand code with notepad or in my cpanel. I don't like programs because it takes more time to get it just like I like it. Plus I get alot of joy hand coding html

 

Hand coding is very fast -- when combined with good modular coding techniques as provided by SHTML and CSS.

Coding with one of those gee-whiz GUI's would be a lot slower for me.

 

No, there are not better uses. Like Will stated, using an editor slows me down as well... I mean really!

 

notepad/wordpad sad i know, the code sticks in my head this way

 

Have you ever tried something with syntax highlighting?

http://www.editplus.com/
http://www.textpad.com/

 

Well I do use notepad2 if/when I have an error in a php script (so I can find the line no)

 

Just FYI Notepad2

 

I use PHP Edit, which I find a very nifty freeware php/html editor. Anyone else here use it?

 

I tried it but found it slow and cluttered. That was awhile ago though, so maybe it's better now

 

hand coding = good code
hand coding = fast code (if you do it right)

Pretty much every IDE is trying to be all things to all people, therefore it compromises, especially in the code.

I recently got a FP generated page from a client. 1 page = 80k. After 5 minutes with search and replace I got the page down to 15k, no change in how it looked.

Dreamweaver is not as bad but have you seen the javascript? Yikes! 50 odd lines of code to do a rollover... gimme a break!

As I read in another post, speed is everything. If you can get the page to load in 8 seconds, see if you can make it 7. Got it down to 7, aim for 6. The only way you will ever get that is by optimizing images, compressing the page and hand coding.

With that rant out of the way, I will say that WYSIWYG editors are good for prototyping and banging out complex tables. But then again, since most of my tables are generated that features is used less.

Me: OSX / BBedit / ee on FreeBSD for tweaks

My goals - learn to code better CSS (and understand it) and aim for true content / presentation separation - rinse, repeat, make $1M -- oops sorry, this is not the adsense forum

 

yup i like notepad best..

 

Hi,

I'm using Notepad++.
I was a Frontpage user, but at least for my needs it's very heavy and overfeatured, I prefer uncluttered software. Appart from that, seeing and "touching" the code is the best way to learn it.

 

Syn is an Open Source Text and Programming Editor

Man! There are multiple dictionaries available for spellckeck, case change, there isn't really anything I can think of.... oh, maybe live url or insert links, I haven't used it hardly.

Just found it anyways