While in the midst of my on going site redesign, I decided to to give MacRabbit’s Espresso a try. Currently, I mainly have been using Panic’s Coda at home to do my work, and I still mostly use Dreamweaver CS3 on a PC (ugh…) at work. I have to say, after using Dreamweaver for so long it took me a few days to adjust to using Coda, but I soon fell in love with it. After developing my first site with Coda I became completely hooked on it. When I read that the makers of CSS Edit were making a similar product, I was immediately interested in trying it out. However, as I had just recently switched Coda and was still in the process of really getting to know it well, I decided to wait a bit. Partly because I wasn’t really ready to try out something new yet and partly because it was a brand new product. I figured I’d wait for them to iron out some of the wrinkles before trying it out. Tonight I decided to give it a try, and I’m really liking what I’m seeing.
First let me tell you about what I like about it. Espresso is in many ways similar to Coda. Like Coda, it has a navigator. I must say, I like to positioning and functionality of much better. On the css side, both will list out the selectors that you are styling. In Coda, you click on a selector in the navigator and it’ll take you to the code and briefly highlight it. In Espresso it will show you the actual style in the navigator window for things like text. I can see this having both it’s ups and downs. But the thing I really like is the html navigator. Coda only seems to show major elements like divs and headers. Coda will show you in what order they appear, but you wouldn’t be able to tell if one div is located inside another div or other things like that. In Espresso you get a good hierarchical view of how elements in the file are laid out with collapsing parent elements and their child elements contained with in them like a fold. It also goes a step farther and tells you not only divs and headers, but where the paragragh tags are, ordered and unordered lists and each <li> inside those lists. It ever tells you were comments are made. Seems like a much easier way of getting around code, especially when working with large documents.
I’m not a huge fan of the workspace, however. The workspace seems to be Espresso’s version of tabs in it’s main window. While I like the concept, if you’re working on a project that has lots of files and you need to scroll down from the list of files, you loose the ability to see what “tabs” you have open until you scroll back up to the top of the list again. Seems like it sort of defeats the purpose to me. If you want to have several documents open in a window with a traditional tab on top, you can drag files out of the workspace into new windows and arrange them however you want. The only problem with this is, you lose the side bar with all of your files on it and if you close the tab in that window it doesn’t reappear in your workspace again.
Those seem to be my main likes and gripes with Espresso after fooling around with it for about an hour or so. I’ll probably find more things about it as I try and use it a bit more in the upcoming days I’m sure. Oh, and one last thing… why is it that almost every program in OSX has a different (and usually crappy) keyboard shortcut for switching tabs? And why doesn’t OSX allow me to make control+tab a shortcut for things in the system preferences? This would make me so much happier… I’m not a fan of command+shift+ { or } to change tabs… not a fan at all… [/rant]