Coda 2.5 Released | Hacker News Reader

Coda 2.5 Released

panic.com

45 pointsmattstrayer42 comments

I really, really enjoyed Coda for quite a few years in the 1.x days. Panic makes really good stuff.

But had a hard time figuring out how to work Coda into a more "modern" workflow with Git, and moved on to Sublime because it has a more active plugin community and is cross-platform.

Maybe I should take another look at it. Coda definitely excels at the "I have a local copy of a website, and need to sync it with what's on the server over SFTP" workflow.

That was back in the 1.x days, though. I haven't looked at it in ages. Should I? I do mostly Rails these days.

Coda 2, released a few years ago, brought a lot of git-related changes. Things like branching, merging, and committing are integrated in the UI. Personally, I like to have a terminal window open in Coda for git, but the integrated solution works reasonably well.

Thank you for the reply! Now I'm going to give it another spin...

I definitely outgrew Coda a few years ago although I occasionally fire it up to use its visual grep. However, in the time since I switched to other editors (Chocolat, Sublime, and now Atom), my workflow has changed significantly.

I'm ready to do a clean install for Yosemite, and maybe it's also time to give Coda another look. I had been planning to switch back to Sublime after giving Atom a shot (there's a lot to like, but it's slow as molasses and the autocomplete is total garbage). So much of my workflow lives outside of my editor these days, so maybe it makes sense.

What did you think of Chocolat, compared to the others? I've been meaning to give it a try.

I have had chocolat installed for a long time and I sometimes use it when I don't want to look at a file in vim, which is pretty often when I just want to read the code. I hang out in the #chocolat channel on Freenode. My take on it is the developer sincerely cares about making a great editor, and it has always been pretty simple to use. The economics of being yet another code editor are not great and Alex is the only owner and developer yet he is still dedicated to the project. I am not sure you will ever see the kind of ecosystem that TextMate and Sublime Text enjoy, but if you can see past its faults, chocolat is a pretty nice little editor.

I started using it shortly after I outgrew Coda. I went to Textmate at first, but it was around the time that Textmate seemed totally dead. Its interface reeked of 2004 but Chocolat was quite modern. I liked it a lot but I was eventually lured away by Sublime's ecosystem. Then I got sick of dealing with JSON for my settings and checked out Atom. But I find that I'm not really taking all those rich ecosystems that Sublime and Atom offer. It's probably time for me to take another look at Chocolat as well.

I'm a huge fan personally, I especially like it's implementation of combined gutter linting and git line diffs.

I love Chocolat. It's fast. Code completion is excellent. It picks up where Textmate left off and uses the same bundles/plugins. And it doesn't require a bunch of customization to make it look at home on my Mac. I periodically fire up Sublime and Atom for fun, but Chocolat is most comfortable for me.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I see Coda fitting in between the poweful IDE's produced by JetBrains (ItelliJ, WebStorm, PHPStorm, etc.) and text editors. I think one issue for Coda is that development workflows (especially web development) changed significantly since version 2 was released in 2012. Coda is still a very nice application if it fits in your workflow.

I've used Coda for a few years, during which time I started using Sublime + wbond's FTP plugin. Coda is still crucial to my remote PHP freelance workflow. For remote work, it's a much more polished experience when dealing simultaneously with multiple active/live projects.

Sublime FTP's experience can improve slightly when using it in mirror mode, but in practice I've found issues with very slight time differences between my local computer and the remote computer, which can cause unnecessary or possibly dangerous syncing.

Can't really think of any Coda negatives other than lack of git integration. I generally just keep an SSH open to commit anything.

Edit: nvm, it does have git integration. I'll have to try it out.

> FTP

Please do not use FTP, FTP sends everything over the wire in clear text, across the entire internet. You should not be using FTP for anything ever. Use SFTP, scp, HTTPS from the server, but not FTP.

I don't use FTP. The plugin for sublime I was referring to is called Sublime SFTP. It supports SFTP, which I use for all my projects.

Check it out here: http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/sftp

For my day to day work, I use PHPStorm and PyCharm. But, I've been working on a bunch of exercism.io problems in various languages, and figured I'd give Coda a shot for that. I ended up absolutely hating it. Couldn't get the split windows to work the way I liked, and I felt like I was fighting with the editor every step of the way. It's a shame, because it would have been a nice way to manage all the little exercise folders.

Sneaky pricing trick there. Coda 2 wasn't $99. It was $75 or possibly $50, due to a never ending discount.

yeah I was thought the price sounded much higher than I remember.

This was due to the lack of upgrade pricing in the App Store; they essentially gave everyone the upgrade price for a while. $99 was always the intended "retail price"; now that they've abandoned the App Store, I expect Coda 3 will have separate pricing for upgrading vs. buying new.

I used this years ago and just tried it out this version. I really wanted to like it. Sadly, it still lives in a world where we all use MySQL, SVN, and FTP. Git may be supported, but it's an afterthought. For $99, Panic should include a time machine back to 2004.

Love Coda 2 and am very excited about Coda 2.5. The one major annoyance for me with 2 was not being able to search remote locations. I don't see this in the release notes. If the Panic team is listening, can we get this in version 3?

I would like this feature too (as well as indexing symbols from remote files), butI wouldn't expect it, due to the potential for overwhelming a server by downloading hundreds or thousands of files. Doing the search server-side would be prohibitively complicated, due to the variety of shells and environments.

The workaround would be to use a setup that mounts SFTP drives locally (ExpanDrive, MacFusion, etc).

You're absolutely right about the challenges, but mounting SFTP drives locally wouldn't solve the problem - in that scenario, every file would still have to be downloaded to your machine in order to be searched.

It doesn't seem totally unsolvable, though. I mean, if Coda can connect via SFTP then it can almost certainly connect to the server and run commands like awk, grep, find, Silver Searcher, etc. There's no technical reason why Coda couldn't run those commands on the remote host and return their results to you.

That's still quite a frigging challenge, obviously - there's a huge range of Unix utils that may or may not be available on each individual remote host. Coda would have to do some trial-and-error and/or probing on each remote host to see what's available.

Yeah, local SFTP would still be horribly inefficient; presumably you'd be aware of the leaky abstraction and use it lightly, whereas things would get messy if Coda tried to abstract it for you.

> There's no technical reason why Coda couldn't run those commands on the remote host and return their results to you.

The other obstacle I see is Windows-based S/FTP servers, which presumably lacks grep, et al.

(One other little gripe: I wish I could open remote files directly from Coda's terminal, which would sidestep half the inconvience of remote searching. If it's not in 2.5, I'll have to remember to submit a feature request.)

  The other obstacle I see is Windows-based S/FTP servers, which presumably lacks grep, et al.

Fortunately, not always!

I believe a lot of Windows users who run SFTP do so via Cygwin's sshd, which for most intents and purposes is a full Posix implementation. At the very least, you can grep your heart out! (I've run it on a few Windows servers myself)

I don't have the slightest clue what Cygwin's relative marketshare is in the Windows SFTP space but I'm guessing it's pretty high because all the other solutions I found were from weirdo vendors I'd never heard of, very expensive, or both. I also had a hunch that a lot of the commercial solutions were wrapping/using Cygwin but I never looked into it.

Regardless, yeah, some servers would not be remotely searchable! This doesn't seem unsolveable from a UI perspective. Coda could disable the search box for those hosts and provide an explanatory note. Or maybe via a little red/yellow/green searchability indicator next to the remote search box.

I used Cloud9 for awhile and they were able to provide a pretty good search solution for remote projects. I just preferred having a local IDE.

Looking forward to giving this a spin, I moved over to using brackets a lot but remember liking Coda a lot. I think I will have another go at using it the changes sound like they have some pretty big improvements.

I'm new to programming. Is Coda worth the $99 price compared to Sublime?

Depends how you like to code. One is a text editor with an optional fee of $70 the other is more like an IDE for web development. Both are powerful and useful tools. For most people I think it's just personal preference.

If you want to get access to Sublime Text 3 Beta, the $70 fee is not optional. Just an observation.

It is: http://www.sublimetext.com/3

Yes, sorry, bad wording. You can download a Sublime Text 3 Beta build, however, you need a valid key in order to use it.

Edit: Could be that you only need a valid key for the development builds. I was under this impression because those are the ones that I always download.

There was a period (about 6 months?) that ST3 was in "private" beta, and you indeed had to buy a license to use it.

For a while now it's in "open" beta, meaning everyone can download and use it.

I'd suggest trying out their trial version (I think they still have that) to see if you like it. I used to use Coda, then Coda 2, but moved onto Sublime Text and haven't looked back. I still fire it up occasionally, but ST is my go-to editor.

Depends on what kind of coding you are interested in and what your workflow is like.

If you are a new web developer it could be worth it, if you are looking into other non-web programming sublime or atom are probably the better choices because there are a lot of plugins and they support a bunch of different languages.

I prefer Sublime, but Coda has better support for accessing remote locations (via FTP, sFTP, etc). With ST2, you need a third party plugin to do this and I found it a bit awkward to use.

I like using Transmit to mount wherever I'm working-with as a drive, then saving is pretty seamless.

I will have to give that a try again. I had it working for awhile, but the drive disappeared.

Personal taste. I tried an older version of Coda and instead bought http://www.macrabbit.com/espresso/ because it felt more in tune with my style, and because it came with the wonderful CSSEdit. But Panic makes great products, several of which I've bought. Transmit is cooler than an FTP client has a right to be.

I have both, Sublime seems to be leaner, but Coda has some neat features. If you are new to programming I would personally use Sublime since it is free, and then decide from there after a month or so.

Ahem, Sublime Text costs 70 USD at the moment.

If you want an actual free but very solid programmers' text editor for the Mac, try TextWrangler (the baby sibling of BBEdit).

Sublime is great but _not_ free.

I used to like Coda when I was mostly developing PHP stuff solo with MAMP, but when doing serious stuff I find it kind of an impediment. I still love Transmit.

IMO it might not be worth to spend that kind of money on something like this if you don't know what you want from it yet, which you don't seem to. Maybe you can find some free editor/IDE, or a free version of such? Then maybe you can choose what to purchase (if anything) once you know what you want.

Coda's idea is a one window workflow, complete with webkit / FTP / Git / terminal built in. Most of my days using Coda I spent simply using it as an editor. Its a philosophical standpoint that really depends on workflow. Its integrated FTP operations are fantastic.

When I changed jobs, and started working for a company with much better work flows (and required more complex tech stacks), I ended up jumping to Sublime + Tower, and just using the terminal separately. On the blue-moon that I need a FTP, I fire up Transmit. Since I'm working off local hosts, then pushing my commits to Git repositories that are then served to Jenkins, (staging/beta builds vs production) I'm now never touching the server itself.

Coda is geared best for someone looking for a one app solution to a multitude of things. I think like many, I started with Coda and outgrew it and that's fine. Its a great place to start and does a good job of being accessible. Panic is renowned for its UI/Design and Coda certainly shows that.

I've still yet to fully embrace the nuances of Sublime Text even after a year of using it as my primary editor. Sublime is not a pleasant experience to configure.

So to summarize, Coda is a great place to start.

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