My favorite text editor for as long as I can remember is Homesite. I still use it today to edit HTML, PHP, etc. Homesite began life as a product developed by Nick Bradbury. Nick sold the software to Allaire. Allaire was acquired by Macromedia and then most recently acquired by Adobe when Adobe acquired Macromedia.
Adobe has announced that it no longer will support Homesite and is pushing customers into Adobe Dreamweaver CS4. Adobe notes, “After careful consideration, Adobe discontinued development of Macromedia HomeSite software effective May 26, 2009. Field and channel sales of the product ended on May 26 and sales across all channels, including the online Adobe Store, ended June 18, 2009. Existing customers are encouraged to consider the development environment of Adobe® Dreamweaver CS4 software.”
A real shame as Adobe really has no product that is lightweight and works for raw coding. I will continue to use Homesite as it meets my needs for coding. You can read my last review of Homesite 5 from a few years ago.
2 Responses
It’s sad. I was disappointed in 2007 when GlobalScape discontinued CuteHTML, as that was my favorite (from the sounds of it, it was rather similar to HomeSite).
This is why I use Linux for quite a bit of my Web development, as there are still a handful of really good, simple, lightweight editors available for Linux (including Bluefish, my current favorite).
Still, you should at least count yourself lucky that Adobe continued support for HomeSite into Vista. Those of us that used Pagemaker (I started using PageMaker at version 3, back in the Aldus days), we lost support when Vista came out. Instead, we were forced to either purchase InDesign (which currently runs $199 for an upgrade and $699 for a new copy) or keep Windows XP (which, for those of us that bought new computers around that time, was not really an option, unless we purchased a full license for XP, which was basically the same price as InDesign). The worst part was, InDesign (for that $199 upgrade price tag) was really just a repackaging of PageMaker, with very few new features.
For PHP code, though, phpDesigner is a really nice alternative, and extremely inexpensive ($55). I’m not sure how it would do with other languages, but I’m sure it’s worth a try (there’s a free trial).
nice – will check it out – thanks