So, I just finished writing an email to a nice person I met on Twitter who was talking about starting to learn Adobe Dreamweaver. My heart fell when I heard this news and so I stepped in to do what I could.

If you have a friend ailed by the same affliction … just remember:

Friends don’t let friends dreamweaver.

Here’s why:

It’s a piece of software that does a lot of things for you. That sounds good, and it might be if we were far in the future, but today with a product from Adobe… it does too much. What happens is your lose control over your code. And when you lose control, you inevitably lose understanding. And understanding your code is what lets you hone your craft. But to do that you need to be in touch with your code, you need to craft it by hand and move through it easily.

When you understand your code and know it intimately it becomes a sleek thing of beauty. Clean, beautiful code is fun and rewarding to write. Dreamweaver, at it’s heart, is not a code editor — it is a WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get). I mean, just check their website it barely even mentions code. The problem with WYSIWYG’s is that they’re just not smart enough to create great code. You are.

My personal experience is on Mac. But I looked up a discussion thread on Forrst re: windows code editors and came up with the following alternatives:

Windows code editors, that come highly recommended:

• Note Pad Plus
• Aptana
• Sublime Text

Code editing in the cloud:

• Kodingen
• Bespin

On Mac, there’s three basic, brilliant, options:

From what I’ve seen, I’d switch to Mac just for the code editors. But of course, you could say that about every experience on the Mac.

• Text Mate: the barebones editor that manages to be a powerhouse
• Coda: brilliant software by a brilliant software company. More of an all-in-one solution. It combines FTP and a browser for “one-window web development” into a package I could easily write an entire post about.
• Espresso: not used it much. Seems more along the lines of Coda tho.

Feel free to get in touch if you’d like me to blather on more about this sort of thing. Otherwise, best of luck comrade!