skEdit Web text editor-value priced, feature packed
skEdit. Chances are that you’ve never heard about it. If you edit HTML, that’s a shame. skEdit is a sweet little web editor.
In this era of mega-apps that do everything, skEdit just does web text. It has syntax highlighting, but only for web languages HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Asp, Perl, Python, PHP and ColdFusion. See where I’m going with this? Most programming editors try to cover everything. That’s great if you program in a dozen languages and eat C++ with your Wheaties. I don’t. I do web sites. I use HTML and CSS every day. I use JavaScript and PHP a couple of times a week. Except for a little SQL, that’s the extent of my programming. If you jive on Java, go elsewhere. I’ll stay here with skEdit.
It is nice to have a program that’s focused on one area and performs its job well. skEdit does and at a remarkably low price. I learned web design with BBEdit. I stayed with it for several upgrades, shelling out my $50 each time. skEdit costs $25. Period. Upgrades are free. And upgrades come with reasonable frequency. This is not a throw away piece of shareware, but one that it lovingly crafted by an involved developer. When BBEdit came out with version 8, I oohed and ahhed at the nifty new features, tried the demo and decided not to plunk down another installment payment on my web editing. Don’t get me wrong. BBEdit is a fine program. But then so is skEdit and I had grown used to its way of doing things and found it good.
skEdit has a long list of features, most of which I actually use, unlike those of some other programs. I love the code completion and the tabbed windows. skEdit lets me save projects and will open all the files in a project (Site) in a side panel. It works sort of like Dreamweaver’s site view. I wish I could access my sites with a drop down menu but opening the Site list box is easy enough.
There’s built in S/FTP capability, actually a built in client, Fugu. It’s not the most full featured FTP program around and it’s not as easy to use as the Open from FTP, that’s built into BBEdit, but it gets the job done.
What I really love is the Snippets function. With a bit of work you can craft your own code snippets and assign keyboard shortcuts for them. The ability to do most of my work, including bracketed tag insert, from the keyboard is a real time saver and one of the criteria I use to catagorize a program as for a pro or amateur end user. skEdit is definitely a pro program and has an excellent workflow.
Besides those little special treats, there’s the standard list of pro coding essentials including multiple file search and replace with regular expressions. skEdit has block indenting, auto-tabbing, bracket highlighting, auto-completion, WebKit and browser preview, multiple charachter encodings and character entities. If you structure your documents well, skEdit will allow you to jump through the DOM, going to specific named elements or H tags. It has HTML Tidy built in, too. There is now Subversion support, through a plugin, though I haven’t tried it yet.
The only thing that I really miss is support for John Gruber’s brilliant Markdown HTML conversion tool. While I don’t use Markdown when I design pages, I do use it for most of my pre-post blog editing.
skEdit v3.6
For Mac OS X versions 10.3 and later
$24.95
Developer’s site: http://www.skti.org/
Features: 4+
Ease of Use: 5
Value for Money: 5
Documentation: 4+
Macness: 5
Highly recommended