Coder’s Eye

Developing sites for clients involves a lot of heavy CSS work for me. I’d been using Aquamacs, an Emacs editor for OSX. That was good, but I don’t care for any of the CSS modes available. I moved to TextMate, which was much better, but still very much a code, reload, code, reload cycle.

That gets very slow, especially when developing using something like Drupal which isn’t very speedy to begin with.

CSSEdit is different

It isn’t a WYSIWIG CSS editor. I don’t like that type of software, they are too blunt an instrument, and miss all the finessing one can achieve with CSS. Instead it is an editor which has live previews of the real site. It is really quite unusual how it works. Basically, you browse to a site, and tell CSSEdit you want to override the stylesheet. You can extract the stylesheet from the site, or else use one you already have on your computer. From then on, the changes you make to the stylesheet are instantly reflected in the linked browser window.

This has decreased my time-to-develop CSS for finicky, pixel-perfect sites by at least half. Without exaggeration. For example, absolute positioning is no longer trial and error. Or, rather it is, but you can very quickly get that element placed precisely where you want it because you can see it move when you change the numbers.

I also appreciate the syntax-aware completion abilities. If I type “fon”, it starts offering me “font-size, font-style, font-weight, font-family”, and I can just complete from there. Once I’ve selected “font-style” with a down-arrow and a colon, it then starts offering me the appropriate options for that css rule.

At $29.95, the thing is a steal for anyone who does more than an hour or two of CSS coding. Even if you are just a hobbiest, isn’t your free time worth more than that?

Technorati Tags: reviews, cssedit, osx, css, editors, text-editors, programming-editors