free javascript editor mac
Best code editor for Mac OS X?

Hello. I’ve been the code editor Coda for the past fifteen days, but now the trial is over… and it costs $99.. so, is there any other good code editor that I can use (for free, preferably) to edit HTML/PHP and Javascript?

I’ve used four different editors over the past few years for my PHP development:

Originally I used TextWrangler. It’s a very good and robust text editor, but it isn’t really cut out for super-heavy-duty coding.

For a while I used Smultron. It’s also little more than a text editor, but it includes some better syntax highlighting and (if I recall correctly) the ability to open and save files via FTP.

Then I tried Zend Studio. I really like Zend Studio; it has an integrated file browser, open/save via FTP, acceptable syntax coloring, and generally hit the “sweet spot” of the features I need without any bloat. However, it suffers from a number of interface bugs and doesn’t feel like a Mac program (it is clearly a mediocre port from Windows). I should point out that Zend Studio 7 was just released, and I haven’t tried that version, so it’s likely that they’ve fixed most of the issues I had with it. ZS is a little pricey, however.

Lately I’ve been using Eclipse with PDT. Eclipse is a great IDE and it has incredibly advanced features (including automatic code formatting, automatic refactoring, and the most detailed syntax coloring ever) but it often feels like I have to fight it to make it do what I want. For example, it doesn’t come natively with open/save via FTP — you have to download a separate plugin for that. Also, Eclipse often belies it’s Java roots — for example, it seems to still want me to put my files in packages and declare a build path, even though these are concepts which don’t really apply to PHP development, and it will complain loudly if I don’t. On the other hand, it’s free and it does nearly everything you can imagine, so it’s hard to complain. If you’re going to do PHP work with it, be sure to download PDT rather than vanilla Eclipse.

Hopefully one of those will work for you. Good luck!

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