Can anyone use Dreamweaver?

[Wrestlevania]

I don't understand why they don't just show people Flickr and Blogger/Wordpress/Posterous or something.

Doing that would be far more relevant from my perspective as well.

Can you not speak to your tutor about the merits and benefits of this approach—of researching and using a dedicated service on a big network like Tumblr or Flickr?

Failing that, I’d like to help* you with the coding stuff.

…unless I’ve missed someone offering already; it’s difficult to read and navigate a desktop res site on my phone. :sadtrombone:

[juv3nal]

I am a huge fan of Sublime Text 2, an heir to the awesome TextMate. It is multi-platform and free while still in Beta. It is slightly wackily supported because of that. It supports textmate plugins, so any textmate bundles you can just drop at it and it will play nice with them.

Oh incidentally, the guys that do sublime text owe you a beer or something. I got my manager to foot the reg fee when the trial ran out. I figure I'll just duck into eclipse when I actually need to do a diff, because sublime seems better in pretty much every other circumstance.

[Wrestlevania]

I figure I'll just duck into eclipse when I actually need to do a diff, because sublime seems better in pretty much every other circumstance.

If you're on Windows, WinMerge is pretty excellent.

On Mac, you've got free stuff like SourceGear's DiffMerge or Xcode's FileMerge (if you fancy the 1.6GB download... ), and really beautiful stuff like Kaleidoscope if you want to put your hand in your pocket.

And if you're on Linux, you're probably reading this via Terminal anyway.

[subbes]

Terminal? Psh. I get my Idle Thumbs forum updates via carrier pigeon.

[MrHoatzin]

Actually spacer gifs are still alive and well in emails. I recently had to use them for something because Outlook 2007 and 2010 use the Microsoft Word rendering engine.

This is true, but again I consider this Microsoft's problem. They're trying to break the internet by brute force, forgetting it is not the 90s any more and their fiat doesn't matter. I also try not to be the one making emails ever. I still do them way more often than I would like to. And for whatever reason the place I work errs on the side of designing unduly elaborate stuff at times (and the clients like it ridiculously complicated as well), so I have to regress into times past and nest tables like a primitive.

[James]

Actually spacer gifs are still alive and well in emails. I recently had to use them for something because Outlook 2007 and 2010 use the Microsoft Word rendering engine.

Oh god, I'd totally forgotten about that. What a nightmare.

I think if this is what you need Dreamweaver for, everyone in this thread is overcomplicating it unless you are looking to become a professional web designer or are interested in having a slicker portfolio site than most artists with an image gallery and contact info.

In my view, if the design requires spacer GIFs, it's Dreamweaver that's overcomplicating things. Are there no WYSIWYG editors that can produce CSS-based layouts?

Whatever will get the job done is fine, I suppose, but as Yufster suggested, if the sole objective is simply to showcase some work, there are plenty of online services that will serve that purpose perfectly well.

[Laxan]

In my view, if the design requires spacer GIFs, it's Dreamweaver that's overcomplicating things. Are there no WYSIWYG editors that can produce CSS-based layouts?

Dreamweaver does this. At least CS5 version does anyway. I used the WYSIWYG view a fair bit for a project and didn't have to deal with spacer GIFs or tables at all, and it handled the CSS just fine (from what I could tell).

[Erkki]

Hmm... I've not much to add that others haven't said, but IMHO syntax highlighting is the least difference between notepad and an IDE (but it's probably the one thing you have to have to even be considered an IDE or coder's editor)

I'm mainly a non-web developer nowadays and I never remember how all those CSS field names are written exactly. So autocomplete, or even just error highlighting, helps me a lot with that.

Knowing the navigation and basic text manipulation tools (and their shortcut keys) are probably the most important thing about editors to me -- because I do most of my work in Eclipse, I prefer to use that for HTML / CSS / JavaScript as well.

I mean all the stuff like "move line up" and "autoident" and "select the word to the left of the cursor" and stuff like that. I don't know, most editors probably have a very very similar set of those kinds of tools, and you can change the shortcut keys, but I never bother with that -- I prefer my software to be non-customized where it can be, so I can more easily use it on whatever computer. So that's why I prefer to use Eclipse for almost everything.

[ysbreker]

Speaking of good editors. I've recently switched to phpstorm at work. And I rather like it. Excellent versioning system integration, auto complete and a superfast search function. It also has some excellent plugins to integrate it with your favorite issue tracker. Deffo worth checking out.

[Twig]

In other news, I switched to Sublime for finishing up my last Advanced Real-Time Rendering project, and holy fucking shit this thing is amazing.

YOU CAN EDIT MULTIPLE LINES AT ONCE.

WHAT.

It's sixty bucks to buy it. I think I'm gonna do it.

[MrHoatzin]

You can put multiple cursors on the screen and edit text in multiple places at the same time. You can select multiple bits of text and edit at the same time. Pretty handy.

[James]

YOU CAN EDIT MULTIPLE LINES AT ONCE.

WHAT.

It's sixty bucks to buy it. I think I'm gonna do it.

You can do that in Notepad++ for free. That said, Sublime does look rather nice.

[Twig]

You can do that in Notepad++ for free. That said, Sublime does look rather nice.

How? I've been using Notepad++ for a long while. Never knew.

[James]

Alt+click

EDIT: Sorry, that's multiple contiguous lines. Perhaps you can't edit in several places.

ADDITIONAL EDIT: If you look in preferences under "Editing" there's an option for "Multi-Editing". This allows you to have several non-contiguous selections using ctrl+click. Unfortunately ctrl+alt+click doesn't combine the shortcuts (it resets the selection), so you can only use the former shortcut for your first selection.

Anyway, I use the alt+click thing for commenting big arrays and things.

[Twig]

Well, neat. I still vastly prefer Sublime in a lot of ways, though, just in the few days I've been using it. (And although I can and did change NP++'s color scheme, it's also nice to have a default scheme that isn't stupidly white.)