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Thursday, August 19, 2004

WYSIWYG = What You See Is Wasteful Yo-Yo Garbage

It's no secret that Mac users have it good when it comes to software for web development and design. I own a PC, and I wish I had the same choice of products. With the amount of web development I'm doing these days, I really need a better tool. There's no sign of BBEdit for Windows, though.

I'm pretty late to the game of hunting down the best HTML editor. Seems that Macromedia's HomeSite (once Allaire's product) is the king, hands-down. But I wanted a lightweight tool -- I don't have much use for the WYSIWYG stuff (What You See Is What You Get), i.e., a drag-and-drop interface for creating web pages. Nevertheless I'll probably drop the $99 for HomeSite at some point.

For now, however, my mission was to find something better than my Windows Notepad (which was quickly becoming the weapon of choice). I've totally had it with FrontPage. I don't know why I even bothered using it over the last couple months. Similarly, I was enjoying the ASP.NET Web Matrix for a while. A stripped-down version of Microsoft Visual Studio, the Web Matrix was a nice transition from my trusty old Visual Interdev at my previous job. But even the Web Matrix grew old rather quickly.

After some diligent searching, I've settled on HTML-Kit. It's only been a couple weeks since I've installed it, and I'm really liking what I see so far: Lightweight and intuitive interface, hexadecimal color palette, super duper menus, and *tons* of valuable plug-ins. Not too shabby for a free product.

So, web developers of the world (all two of you who visit this site), what tool is your favorite?