Alternative to Dreamweaver?

Question

I'm tired of Dreamweaver overwriting wrong files on the server,

so I'm looking for an alternative.

I want color-coding and possibility to open/save and edit files direct from the server, so I don't need to save files on my desktop first.

I'm using Windows.

Answer 1

If you're using a Mac you should take a look at Coda

Answer 2

Well personally I use Programmer's Notepad but it doesn't support the facility to upload files to the server. You could get Notepad++ and this FTP plugin. I haven't tried Notepad++ but I'm sure that it isn't WYSIWYG.

Answer 3

When developping in PHP, I generally use Eclipse PDT.

If you are more oriented towards HTML/CSS/Javascript, you might be interested by Aptana, which is based on Eclipse too... Which means it can use lots of plugins, including some to work directly on a server, I suppose (see TM/RSE, for instance).

Note than Aptana can also be installed into an existing Eclipse installation, as a plugin.

Oh, also, I almost forgot : Eclipse is free, and there are both a free and a commercial version of Aptana.

(One bad thing about Eclipse being it requires a quite powerful computer -- at least 2 cores and 2 GB of RAM, if you want to use any other application at the same time...)

Answer 4

E Text Editor, a Textmate clone for Windows, claims to have FTP Support. But i haven't used this feature before.

Answer 5

I switched to notepad++ when I had the same kind of problems with DreamWeaver. I tried some other programs too, but they were too complicated for my needs.
If all you need is color-coding and ftp-support, notepad++ is a good choice.

Answer 6

Every web developer should be hand-writing their mark-up - all forms of automated abstraction inhibit your understanding and awareness of the code and create maintenance problems for the future. I'm quite a zealot about this, you may be able to tell.

On that basis, I can heartily recommend Editplus: has code colouring, FTP and a huge amount of feature-sugar from line duplication to macros.

Answer 7

Perhaps KompoZer? It has all the features you've asked for, and there's a Windows version (as well as Mac and Linux).

Answer 8

Visual Web Developer Express, which is the lightweight version of Visual Studio.

http://www.microsoft.com/express/

Answer 9

Dreamweaver... Not my cup of tea, because it lacks good support for modern web programming with Javascript or PHP.

For primary design, I use WeBuilder from Blumentals. Its also a good and not expensive PHP and Javascript IDE with debugging support and also has good CSS support with a built-in CSS editor. I'm not a big fan of text editors like Notepad++ as an IDE replacement, because you often need a lot of additional plug-ins to have similar features like a IDE. But for some files or quick editing nothing can beat such editors (I like Notepad++ the most on Windows).

So for Windows I would prefer WeBuilder for all things (design & programming).

You use only Windows? For Linux there are other alternatives too ;)

Answer 10

I want color-coding and possibility to open/save and edit files direct from the server, so I don't need to save files on my desktop first.

The Zeus editor can highlight and fold HTML files, it integrates with HTML Tidy and can seamless edit files from the server via ftp/sftp.

It also has support for a host of other languages (i.e C/C++, C#, Java, Javascript, PHP, etc etc)