

What do you use for site coding, FTP, and file management? Suggestions? - headShrinker

I use Dreamweaver and hate it. It's bloated and slow, it has far too many features that I never use. Basically I am looking for code-coloring/view, file management and FTP. What are you using?
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matthewking
(OSX) Textmate and Capistrano, aside from that I usually SCP files but if I
have to use FTP I use Transmit.

Use source control such as GIT, commit your work then its as easy as 'cap
deploy' to send it to the server, no messing with files!

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aarongough
Coda.

Hands-down it's the best text-editor I've ever used. But it's also an FTP/SFTP
client. And it'll integrate with your version control. And it will provide you
with a local console/SHH, CSS editor & browser preview (if you are a web-
developer) and a small reference library built-in to the app...

In case you haven't noticed I really can't speak highly enough of Coda. And to
make matters even better, if you have a bug: report it. Don't be surprised
when you hear back from the developers the next day...

<http://www.panic.com/coda/>

~~~
tptacek
I liked Coda, but I had the same problem with it that I have with pretty much
every specialty editor on the Mac: once you've got your Emacs groove worked
out, there's very little you can do to create a _serious_ value-add. I didn't
find Coda so much better than the tools I already had to make it worthwhile.

I'm also not a huge fan of the Coda CSS editor, although modern browsers are
quickly obsoleting CSS editors anyways.

~~~
aarongough
I'll admit that I never actually use the CSS editor... I'm very comfortable
writing my CSS by hand so I continue to do it like I always have.

As far as Coda vs Emacs... I think that's like anything else. I can replicate
all of the functionality of Coda using GEdit + plugins on Ubuntu but it
doesn't have the same feel of a beautiful, coherent, whole. I've never gotten
into vim/emacs in particular as I'm a bit of a fan of nice GUIs.

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Ixiaus
Emacs

Subversion

Rsync

\-----------

 _Emacs_ for a few general text editing tasks and all of my programming tasks
(HTML, XML, PHP, Scheme, Python, etc...). I also use Subversion religiously
and so should you (or any version control system); most editors/IDEs have some
form of an integration plugin for VCS software to make it easy.

I'm not a big fan of FTP. It works well for "little" things, like pushing
images up to a web directory or transferring tarballs from server to server.
For my web application projects I use _rsync_ exclusively - I just have a
little deployment script that I run and it takes care of pushing all the files
up to production/development/sandbox wherever. Rsync will only move files that
don't exist or are "different" from the source, so it is very efficient
especially if you make changes to other files down the road so I don't have to
hunt and peck for which file I changed or upload the entire project all
over...

Also, nothing beats a _consistent_ , cogent, and lucid directory structure and
file naming conventions. Clear thought process = clear work process.

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weaksauce
(OSX) Textmate is a good text editor if you don't need wysiwyg editing. Coda
might be a good alternative if you do.

Cyberduck is a good ftp/ssh over ftp/file client.

For sure use some form of source control to manage files. ( I don't care what
you use just use something. Subversion is ok. Git and Mercurial are nice too.)

My preferred method for updating a site is to checkout/clone from source
control to a new location in your websites hierarchy and then create a soft
link to the new directory. Scripts can automate this process.

ln -si /var/www/mysitecheckedoutfromsourcecontrol
/var/www/mysiterootsetupinwebserverconfig

After that, If you have problems with the new site, you have a simple one line
command to revert the site back to a known good point in time. All you have to
do is relink it to the old site and you are off and running.

ln -si /oldsitepath /var/www/mysitesetupinwebserver

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daleharvey
emacs has a nasty learning curve but it is incredibly powerful and integrates
very well with most languages. (im not religious, vi is probably just as
suitable)

I would also look into deploying your site via whatever vcs you use as opposed
to through ftp, it forces you to keep everything inline

~~~
Ixiaus
I actually shy away from using SVN's update to push files to production or
development; primary reason is I don't like my entire code history sitting in
my public root...

Generally, I prefer rsync. Rsync can exclude all of the .svn directories so
you are pushing the latest working copy and it also only pushes files that are
new or have been changed on the source machine.

You can easily write up a little deployment script that you run when you are
ready and up you go; it does many of the same things (exception being _delete_
) that Subversion's update command does for you.

Because I use rsync with a shell (rather than it's daemon process), I
generally have a passwordless private key to the server so rsync can run
without constantly asking me to authenticate.

~~~
daleharvey
I generally use svn export as opposed to an actual working copy

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akamaka
When I'm working on Windows, SmartFTP is my favorite FTP client. Along with
UltraEdit, it's one of the few commercial utilities that were worth paying
for.

You'd think that the free FTP utilities would be good enough, but SmartFTP has
so much polish and so many small enhancements (especially when it comes to
handling multiple connections, auto-resume, remote file editing, transfer
queuing) that it blows everything else away.

That being said, I'm still on version 2.0, while the current release is 4.0. I
can't comment on how much better or worse it's gotten.

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aphistic
I'm a huge fan of UltraEdit (<http://www.ultraedit.com>). I've been using it
for years and I like the ability to browse any of my (S)FTP sites and make
tweaks quickly. My main day to day work is in Visual Studio so I don't use it
as my primary editor but when I do work on legacy ASP, PHP or any other kind
of text (or binary) files I use UltraEdit. I'm especially happy because they
just released the first version of UltraEdit for Linux (and soon OS X).

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olimay
editor: vim FTP: FileZilla file management: combo of VCS rsync

Editor: Substitute your favorite lightweight, powerful editor for vim. Emacs
and textmate are good choices, I hear. I stuck with vim and am quite happy,
because using the mouse or arrow keys feels like so much effort. I don't like
the heavy meta key dependence of Emacs: most of the people I know who use
Emacs have special keyboards, whereas I'm very comfortable using my notebook
keyboard for vim. Haven't tried Textmate because I run Ubuntu, but Mac people
give it a lot of praise.

FTP: I actually use FTP very sparingly, mostly for clients that have no idea
what a VCS is, or have FTP-only access to their server. If I just need to
upload miscellaneous files, like images etc., I'll scp or rsync from a shell.
But FileZilla is pretty good, and it's cross-platform.

File Management: rsync for very large files (media stuff), giant tarballs, or
stuff I don't like to keep in the VCS, like config files with secrets.
Otherwise, I use whatever VCS is appropriate for the project, which is usually
Subversion. I use Git when I have a choice.

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seldo
I use Eclipse for all my editing.

My deployment method is to commit to svn, then svn update on the server (plus
a script to move the current live site to a backup location in case I need to
roll back). This is faster than FTP and means I've never, ever launched code
that I haven't committed. Even on a one-man project that's useful.

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aarongough
+1 for Dreamweaver being awful. I have to use it so that the content editors
at my workplace can use it too, but that doesn't stop me from wondering how on
earth so many obvious bugs make it into the release version of Dreamweaver...

Adobe, if you're listening at all, start again from scratch. Make something
actually good!

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ronnier
Combinations of Visual Studio, Notepad++, Team Foundation Server, Subversion,
and FileZilla (all depending on which project I'm doing).

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ethan
Komodo Edit: <http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/>

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chrisbolt
TextMate and Subversion, with a post-commit hook that updates a checked out
copy on a staging server.

~~~
Ixiaus
That's my process too, only, we have four different remote sandbox servers...
I wrote a python script that sends out notifications to the sandbox servers to
svn up when the post-commit hook is run.

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vyrotek
Visual Studio and the Publish button

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jacquesm
ssh & vi, svn to keep me sane :)

Call me old fahsioned...

On a java project I work on I use intellij, and I hate every second of it. The
amount of (external api) stuff to remember is simply too large to commit to
memory though.

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icodemyownshit
1\. ssh access 2. Expandrive (mount ssh connection as a drive) 3. notepad++ or
textmate

~~~
ciab
i use sshfs as a way to mount a drive over ssh on ubuntu

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mosheg101
PhpED has been my favorite environment for a while, although it is commercial.

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quickpost
Textmate, Cyberduck, and SVN.

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dpcan
editplus, fireftp, explorer

Fireworks CS4 for graphics editing and splicing

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xsc
Notepad++/Filezilla for SFTP

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souldoubt
Coda, Transmit, OS Finder.

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joe_bleau
Codewright, rysnc, cvs.

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eli
expandrive for SFTP. People really still use regular FTP?

~~~
tptacek
There are decent reasons for avoiding SFTP; regular FTP + VPN is more secure.
Neither of them are as good as a trivial web app that will accept
authenticated uploads and unpack them for you.

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vaksel
can try notepad++

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FalcorTheDog
Aptana

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aw3c2
jedit

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drhowarddrfine
vim and ftp. Don't need anything else though FireFTP on Firefox is good. Don't
have a suggestion for file management other than rsync.

