Coda 2 | Hacker News Reader

Coda 2

panic.com

376 pointsidan99 comments

They seem to have defined their target user, and design around it. And I think most of us are not this target user.

I have used Coda since 1.0, but later switched to TextMate and now, Sublime Text. And eventually, I replaced all the good parts of Coda with something that wouldn't work with Coda as well:

- I write Ruby, not PHP, and it's not one-input-file-equals-one-output-file at all. So preview is not that useful. Completion probably won't work for Ruby as well as for PHP, and so on.

- I don't write CSS or JS anymore, and I don't think I could live without my SCSS or CoffeeScript (well, I can, but it's painful). So all the fancy CSS GUI pop-ups don't help, I have a probably even better solution in code and mixins.

- Finally, all the UI seems to be Novice-friendly, with sidebars and tabs, while I don't even have a sidebar at all on ST2, and just use Cmd+T for opening / switching files.

Also, as for the site itself, the demo tour looks awesome (even though a bit crammed).

All the best to them! I won't be upgrading, but I think many will find Coda 2 a great improvement.

P.S. I love that they list app being "Retina-Ready" while we still don't have any retina Macs yet :)

I followed that same path of editors but ended in vim (instead of sublime) and use a number terminal tools.

Coda is really pretty and wish i could have some of my workflow.

(Sublime is gradually implementing VI commands, if anyone's interested. Look up the Vintage and VintageEx packages.)

I use the vintage package and although not a vim guy, it's definitely useful in some cases. warming up to vim because of the package.

Yes, I did notices that. Sublime is very tempting but the cost and having a workflow that I'm happy with stop me from using in a project atm.

Cost? Seriously? It's like $40.

$59; which is IMHO a totally fair price. Even if you're that strapped for cash, there's no cap on the trial so you aren't pressed for time to come up with the money.

Oh yeah, I watched it without the sound and didnt notice until I put on my headphones. This seems like a dreamweaver replacement. Looks great, but not for my workflow. I'll stick with textmate 1 for now. I love Coda's work though, it all seems very polished and it tends to be a source of inspiration for a lot of developers, myself included.

Looks good but I think this is still more like iWeb than a true hacker's editor. Too much GUI. It assumes you are dealing with more-or-less the LAMP stack and basic PHP websites. Also, I feel like this is kind of another example of do one thing well vs. do a lot of things decently well. If you're depending on one single app for your terminal, MySQL GUI, CSS editor, etc... it feels like bloat. Hand-holding development. Fisher Price. I think most hackers would rather use individual tools that might be more powerful and configurable.

I don't know anyone using Coda except a friend who chickenscratches together jQuery scripts and pieces of PHP. He's not a craftsman.

Just to be clear: Panic makes some great software and they're some really talented guys. I just dislike Coda.

Just for fun: Textmate user for 5 years, have shifted to Sublime because I enjoy some of it's key commands better. They're very similar though. vim on the server.

I think this is the kind of tool primarily used by front end designers/developers. And that's kind of how it's billed. The stuff that seems like bloat is stuff that's actually useful to people more interested in design and user interfaces, like CSS tools and stuff. There are clearly better tools for hardcore d00ds like yourself.

Tools are there to make things easier. It doesn't make you any less of a developer just because you use the Refactor command rather than manually change 20 files. In fact it makes you a better developer.

No offense but I would NEVER hire anybody who subscribed to your way of thinking.

I'm certainly not the easiest person to employ. Everyone I've ever worked with has told me that.

You say that like you're proud of it. At some point as you get older, your idiosyncrasies will make you simply not worth having around, and then you be an easy person to unemploy.

Interesting. As a hacker myself, I would be more interested in hiring (if I was in the position to hire) someone that could quickly `grep` and `sed` their entire repository for the occurrences of a function name that needed refactoring, all the while never leaving the same terminal window that Vim or Emacs was running in.

I agree with both of you though. My frontend co-workers need to constantly have that browser window open and complain about their F5 key wearing thin, while I'm lucky if I manage to remember what local domain name I assigned to Apache that points to the project I've been working on for the past 8 hours. My code tests tell me everything I need to know, and I can tell whether or not they're passing from my same terminal window.

We all use different tools, many times to solve the same problem, and on occasion we'll use the same tools to solve different problems. The wheel wasn't a breakthrough in the transportation technology only, it also sparked the mechanical revolution once someone meshed two together.

This is a false dichotomy. Knowing how to grep is essential, but that doesn't mean you must forego other convenient tools just in order to preserve your "hacker cred". Use whatever is most efficient to do a specific task.

I noticed it's nice new CSS feature only generates Webkit specific CSS[1]. That is not good.

However, I think their usage of CSS3 transforms to focus on different parts of the video is pretty clever. Watching the video on its own feels rather bland in comparison.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/rpVUw.png

" I think their usage of CSS3 transforms to focus on different parts of the video is pretty clever. Watching the video on its own feels rather bland in comparison." It may have been clever, but it absolutely thrashes my cpu. Why didn't they just do the transforms/transitions in whatever they used to record the screencast? Coda2 looks great but using css3 like that will thrash the browser way more than building it out in Flash would have.

And making it a flash piece would certainly be an embarrassment for their brand, given that they're demoing a tool for html and css development (etc.)...

(also, it may well be your machine – my laptop's CPU usage never gets above ~10% while watching it... just say'n is all)

What browser are you using? It runs like a dream in Safari.

And therein lies the rub. Panic is hardly alone, but where once stood a legion of Mac users screaming bloody murder (and rightly so) at websites that were "Designed for IE on Windows", now there is a generation of "Works in Safari? Looks good on my iPad? Ship it!" designers and developers.

Nobody's specified the browser where CSS3 animations look bad yet. I'm not a web developer, but I use Safari, Chrome, and Firefox to varying degrees, and I don't see single-browser breakage going on.

True, unusued CPU power is "going to waste", but when an i7 950 overclocked to 3.5GHz, running of an SSD and 1600MHz memory with Chrome 18 uses 20% of CPU for a transition that's a problem (though with what is a different argument).

My point, though, was that to me it highlighted a more symptomatic issue, that a certain segment of the population, who used to rail against discrimination against their chosen platform, are more than happy to cheerlead / defend / exonerate discrimination for their chosen platform.

Let he who casts aspersions actually check to make sure he doesn't make a fool of himself.

The Panic guys definitely did work to make the site work in different browsers. There's some notes up on their blog at http://www.panic.com/blog/2012/05/notes-from-the-bleeding-br.... Of interest is the fact that they spent a day trying to figure out why Firefox was broken, but stopped when they discovered that Firefox 13 Beta 1 fixes it. They also put in workarounds for Chrome/Firefox bugs.

In any case, even if they hadn't done that, there's a far cry between "Designed for IE on Windows", and using new web standards that aren't fully implemented in all browsers yet.

1. Any sufficiently complicated text editing program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of vim.

2. No new programming environment will ever satisfy advanced vim users without adding a "vim emulation" mode, thus satisfying #1. (p.s. I am a vim user)

I totally agree with #2. I'm curious whether you've tried Sublime's Vintage Mode and what things may have been slow or buggy.

I'd say my Vim skills are somewhere between novice and intermediate and feel entirely out-of-place editing text without vim bindings nearby.

BTW it was a parody of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspuns_tenth_rule

Ohhhhhhh, gotcha.

ST2 is actually way faster when you have to work with long lines and syntax highlighting.

The one thing ST2 REALLY NEEDS is :set rnu.

Wow, tough crowd.

This is a Dreamweaver killer for CMS themers, no need to bring Vim into the conversation.

Finally someone makes the explicit mention.

The app looks great but I think the tab interface looks really...just dumb. I don't understand why so much of my screenspace has to be filled with this obtrusive icon preview of an entire webpage (which you can't completely see), page of code (which you can't completely see), MySQL editor (which you can't comp-ok you get my point).

Otherwise looks good.

Well, to be fair, this "crowd" is not CMS themers.

Looks good. TextMate remains my go-to editor (and that's not going to change, it's just not), but I've always appreciated Coda when doing WordPress work.

The new features make it look like for WordPress or other MySQL-backed CMSes, it'll be super nice.

Would love to know if they plan on doing more to get developers to create more add-ons for Coda. The community is there, but it's super small compared to TextMate, Sublime Text and even Espresso.

Still, as a rule, I buy anything Panic puts out so I'm getting this on Thursday.

ETA: I think the real brilliance here is Diet Coda for iPad. AirPreview is genius and bringing subset editing functionality to the iPad in a meaningful way is great.

> AirPreview is genius and bringing subset editing functionality to the iPad in a meaningful way is great.

There’s no editing functionality, just a preview of the page.

Yes there is, read again. AirPreview is a single feature of the portable viewer/editor for iOS.

http://panic.com/dietcoda/

Completely missed that, sorry.

Hm, when I clicked on the Coda tour button, it sped through the video at 2x speed. That's odd.

I feel a bit sorry for Panic. Their designs, imo, have been mimicked so much across the internet that their site now looks old and cliche. It's not their fault and it looks very nice, but because so many sites use it I just can't stand it now.

Wow, looks very nice. I didn't see anything about this on the page, but is it still geared towards PHP/static/etc sites with normal non-rewritten URLs? It didn't seem to work very nicely with fancy rewritten URLs when I tried it last (for example, the preview feature doesn't work).

The demo shows PHP and the feature list mentions "Improved Ruby," although I am not sure what that means. It's been years since I used Coda and I wasn't doing a lot of hacking back then.

Panic markets their own software better than just about anyone in the business. I always love their new product demo sites!

Not sure I agree. I've never heard of Coda before, and the webpage doesnt really tell me what it does or why I need it. I get the impression its some sort of visual studio-like thingy for mac users?

I like Coda for the built in SSH support.. all my dev work is done on a dedicated dev server, I don't code anything locally.

So everyday text editors don't really work for me. I have tried remote mounting SSH and using text editors that way but its never been as smooth as Coda with the integrated file browsing.

Having a dedicated dev server is a real treat if you want to code from multiple machines and need a real robust server environment.

Love coda for managing large numbers of cms installs. Use it for all my non-vim work (pair programing and more serious dev tasks just work better in vim, makes me think better). Exploring a code base works better for me in coda, the function names in the sidebar and file management, it's a nice light weight IDE. I often end up with both coda and vim going at the same time.

Yes. Function names in the sidebar is the reason I still use Coda. Our workplace code base is so sprawled, this feature alone saves me so much grief.

Have you tried this? SHows functions in a tag bar in vim.

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=273

I think I tried that one out when I was giving Vim a whirl. Unfortunately I couldn't get into it. If there was something similar for Sublime Text 2, I would be very interested.

Command/Ctrl+R will bring up the symbol explorer in ST2. Basically the same as Coda's function explorer.

I do wish it could be a permanent fixture on the sidebar though... not sure if this is possible or not with a plugin.

I really did enjoy using Coda when I was doing PHP work around 2008-2009 (got my company to buy me a copy). Now that I work primarily in Ruby and forced myself to learn Vim a few months ago, I can't ever imagine myself going back to Coda.

That said, it looks like they added a bunch of features I would have loved back then.

Is there an upgrade path for Coda 1 users? Also while the video is presented well, I think they need to change the music - Its far too distracting..

Direct customers (e.g. not the Mac App Store) can upgrade for $75. Recent purchasers (via the direct channel and after April 10, 2012) can get it for free. In addition, every one can get it for $50 (half-off) for the first 24 hours, which is a great tactic if you want to elicit impulse buys through a channel that doesn't support refunds—I'm looking at you Mac App Store.

Users really had to wait so they could build a MySQL editor? Who was asking for that? I'm pretty disappointed, unlike the voiceover for that video. Think I'll stick to Espresso.

Having used Coda since 1.0 as well I have to say I'm very disappointed with this release. The GUI looks like crap and is not intuitive at all.

All the file navigation can easily be done with a keyboard short cut similar to sublime, no need for 50 different ways to do it. The mysql editor looks half assed as well. Where is the improved support for Ruby they mentioned?

Coda 2 looks like an improved version of iweb in the ilife suite.

Really expected more for Panic as I was really excited for Coda 2.

Looks nice, I'm still trialling Sublime text 2 so theres a chance for Panic to win me back - although I am loving Sublime, Coda is what I learnt with so ...

I wonder if they will honour the offer they made during a coda 1 promotion in early 2009. I forget the exact details but there was the promise of a code 2 discount or some kind.

Either way, nice job

They mentioned in the blog post about the release that it would be 50% for the first 24 hours, and a free upgrade for recent purchasers.

Fair play, didn't read the blog post. Just watched the video

It is not clear to me what Coda is. They certainly do not mention it at the site. It looks like some form of IDE but there no other information. I am not going to go through the tutorials without some simple explanation of what it is and where it is applicable.

Are you serious? The first paragraph:

"You code the web. We revolutionized that process in Coda, putting everything in one place. An editor. Terminal. CSS. Files."

What languages does it support? What OS? or is it a Web App itself?

The Mac App Store icon infers that it's a Mac app. As for languages, you're right that it isn't clear. Having said that, the main window is a text editor which performs highlighting on all of the major web languages (in Coda 1.x anyway).

If you're not a Mac user, how would you know what the App Store icon looks like?

There was nothing in the Help/FAQ either, so it wasn't until I manually navigated to panic.com, seeing that they do Apple apps, that I finally got pretty sure it wouldn't be available for my platform.

There comes a point where preparing for all levels of pedantry isn't wise and it's fine for people to assume a certain level of knowledge/experience from their target audience especially if their target audience isn't everyone.

* AirPreview requires separate purchase of Diet Coda.*

Thats a pretty big bummer considering it's the most compelling feature. Also, I know panic is a mac only shop, but platform locked desktop apps seem a bit unsavory these days. Especially applications for developers.

Reminds me of Dreamweaver

Ack, that music makes me feel like I just found a dark and dangerous bonus level in Mario.

Ultimately it's about what you do with the tool, there's not one size fits all editor as far as I know. You don't need to be a CMS themer or Dreamweaver fan to like this, it has all sorts of features that you may or not use if you don't like. What you can do with it it's up to you. For example, I do music and use software that costs around $500 dlls. I know several musicians that are using far less expensive software, with less capabilities and they're making amazing songs. Well?

Well, it's about time. I mean, it only took 3 years.

Coda has always been for the "front end" developer. I've moved on to PHPStorm and Sublime. But I will be taking look at Coda 2.

I don't see the cost anywhere?

I think it said $50 for the first 24 hours, after that it's a $75 upgrade, $99 new.

As someone who really uses vim all the time, this is impressive, even if I am not target user. Coda for me was app that was defining mac as a platform.

I want to know more about why they chose to share absolutely nothing in the build-up, launch a gorgeous video today, and then aren't ready to take purchases for 48 more hours?

That just seems like a huge mistake to me. Surely the point of being silent in development was to have this big unveiling. Shouldn't the sale then kick off right now while we're still (in theory) amazed at it?

(Especially with MAS not offering refunds...)

Is anyone else unimpressed by what is new given the amount of time they've taken between releases 1 and 2? Coda 1 came out over 5 years ago, and few, if any, of the highlighted new features are new to the world of development, just new to Coda.

I will say I like the embedded editors for colors in CSS, but that was the biggest improvement I think I see.

You didn't read anything on the page, did you?

I didn't find anything about 'App Sandbox' in the app features/descriptions... Is it fully sandboxed? Because, you know, Apple will enforce sandbox effective June 1st! It means that Apple will pull Coda 2 in about 7 days after its lunch.

I wouldn't buy Coda 2 from the App Store before June 1st if I were you.

This may actually be sound advice given this tweet from Steven Frank (co-owner of Panic).

https://twitter.com/#!/stevenf/status/204675630363721728

> It means that Apple will pull Coda 2 in about 7 days after its lunch.

Citation required. Can you back up that statement? Everything else that I've seen indicates that Apple will require apps submitted after June 1 to be sandboxed. I've seen nothing indicating they'll pull old apps.

Furthermore, what's to say they can't get custom entitlements? Apple is extremely eager to have every app sandboxed and has emphasized many times they'll work with apps who need permissions not in the standard set of entitlements to build custom entitlements.

I wouldn't give Panic $49, $79 or $99 (or even $0.99) just for Coda 2.0.0.0. I want all the future updates, which, if Apple does not grant custom entitlements, wouldn't make it into the App Store.

I have a huge respect for Panic (specially for their taste in design) and I use their products, but not addressing this issue seems very unprofessional to me.

Apple will not pull non-sandboxed apps from the Mac App Store. They have previously communicated that existing apps will be able to stay in the App Store. They won't accept new non-sandboxed apps and they won't accept new, non-sandboxed versions of apps with the notable exception of minor maintenance/bugfix updates.

Source: the email Apple sent to all registered Mac developers in February.

Coda works really well for WordPress work and for static sites. I'm interested to see if the new version is strong for uses beyond that.

I am very excited for Diet Coda. I can't see myself doing serious code work on an iPad, but for quick fixes and small work, it would be great to have it on the go.

Finally!!! Coda's editor really shines with their sidebar IMO. Being able to drag and drop files, seeing meaningful icons, built in ftp editor when you need it... etc. I just hope it has a split-pane feature the way sublime does as I have become addicted to the way that works.

I own a coda 1 license, but i'm not sure any of this will pull me away from sublime text 2.

I only use coda for remote wordpress sites. It looks like it's even better for that, but for anything significant, sublime, along with a raft of individual tools seems to work way better.

I'll probably pass on this one. I used Coda 1 for a bit but then moved onto TextMate when I started doing almost everything with Rails.

The one Panic app I still use often is Transmit, so I wouldn't mind if they worked on upgrading that now that Coda 2 is near completion.

I use coda for my personal site and a non-profit site I work on on the side. Its not as hard core as my work setup, but its fast and easy and I do like it. Its easy and fast but was getting a little long in the tooth.

I'm all optimism about this.

Say what you want, but that demo was absolutely brilliant.

I am not the target audience, though.

It looks awesome, but I don't think I would enjoy this fancy GUI after a couple of weeks using it. It looks like a replacement for dreamweaver or iWeb.

"Proverbial butter." Nice. Most of the features I hop over to Espresso for (code folding, for one) are in Coda 2, yay!

They added Git support but not Mercurial :(

Until I can set filters on the file display so I don't see .pyc files I'll be giving Coda a pass.

via @panic:

Tap the \ (backslash) key while the video is playing to reveal the entire screen.

Is it just me that thinks this is rather stupid? Now they are downloading much more data then needed and pre rendering the camera movement should also get a better frame rate and the edges would have been anti-aliased.

Is there any reason to use this over something from JetBrains?

I'll purchase if it supports Wordpress in a meaningful way.

http://hitchhackerguide.com/2011/02/18/wordpress-syntax-mode...

There's a third-party syntax mode for WordPress on Coda 1, I suspect it will still work for v2: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/wordpress-syntax-mode-for...

Does anyone know wether it will be good for python dev?

I'd be surprised. Coda 1 can edit lots of file types, but it's clearly intended for a PHP workflow: edit files, preview them, upload to the server. Not sure the whizzy features are going to help you much.

is it useful for anything other than php/css/html?

At least with Coda 1, Ruby and Python are supported too -- and JavaScript, obv. But it's not as robust as some more hardcore text editors.

Does a license to Coda 1 include a free upgrade?

Nope, but it does give you $20 off. $79 vs $99. Also, the app is $50 for everyone for the first 24 hours.

A bit of a bitter pill, for sure, but considering that it's a total rewrite with massive new features, it seems fair.

"If you bought Coda 1 very recently (after April 10, 2012) directly from us, you are entitled to a free upgrade. Unfortunately, Apple does not provide us a way to give free upgrades to all customers who purchased Coda 1 from the Mac App Store recently"

That's what I was looking for - I bought it in the last month.

Thanks for your response.

1. Full File Browser

2. List View and Groups [for Sites]

3. Git support

These features make me incredibly happy. Though I will probably stick to maintaining my ragtag collection of tools (vim, cli tools etc.)

I'm wondering if there will be an upgrade license.

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