Real webmasters don't use text editors for everything anymore. It used to be true but these days it's just macho bullshit. If I have a quick edit to make on something I will use Edit Pad Pro http://www.editpadpro.com/. If I have to do an entire page or add more than a few lines I open up dreamweaver.

There is one application that I have used for almost 8 years now that is a great mix of a text editor and WYSIWYG editor. That's http://www.coffeecup.com/html-editor/

If anyone really is doing all of their designing in a text editor then they are sadistic and infinitely less productive than someone who does it the the right way.

Because the crux of your argument was that non-visual editors are effectively useless, which simply isn't true, and just because it shows correctly in the browsers you use and ranks well in the SERPs doesn't mean that it won't lead to problems for users with disabilities, nor that other aspects such as bandwidth usage and disk space, particularly on larger sites with millions of hits per day could be vastly improved if people coded to the standards and cut out a lot of the bloatcode that WYSIWYG editors add.

I haven't said they are useless. I still doing some tasks in text editors, but I'm using visual ones to do 99% of work. Course everything could be done with natepad, but would you use notepad to to edit RTF files for example if thare are lots of powerful visual editors to do the same thing but much faster (e.g. WordPad, m$ Word etc)?

As I said above, it's 21st century today. So these reasons mean almost nothing now.

vi 90% of the time

Using notepad.exe for much of anything is generally a big flashing sign that says "rookie!"

Maybe adequate for making occasional notes or viewing simple text files, but for anything else, its unusable.

Do my editing in VIM, or TextMate if I'm in OSX.

Most likely not, but taken from the other perspective, would you use MS Word to edit a text file when notepad is smaller, faster and more efficient?

I might be inclined to agree with you if it weren't for my belief that cleaner and less bloated code simply makes for a better and more efficient end product. Sure, you can use the excuse that bandwidth is cheaper these days, servers are becoming cheaper as the days go on and so forth, but why add bloat to your code, which will likely only bloat more as you modify it later down the line? It's a lazy attitude to have and it certainly doesn't earn you any favours when you've got twenty nested div tags and you can't find where each one ends, or which ones are necessary.

Netscape Navigator Gold.

I combine dreamweaver/crimson editor/ed html/fireworks

Both.

For designing NEW pages I usually start with Composer, a visual editor, then open the text editor and clean up the code. Once a page is done, all further updates and changes to it are done with the text editor.


Btw, anyone still using notepad needs to get with the times and start using TEXTPAD. It's a far better webmastering tool, notepad is like working with sticks and rocks compared to it.

I really wish he'd port EPP over to Mac, I've been using it for 6-7 years now, and I miss it so.


Re: MS page pulled up on the validator. They probably used Word to do it :P I hated when clients would come to me and go, I have this webpage I made, I need it to be functional, open the files to see that the code (if you could call it that) between the head tags was no less than 50 lines of bullshit. Oh and don't forget the: <strong><font size="3"></font><i></i><font><font><strong></strong><u><font>The</font></strong>
code that is generated by people highlighting and selecting in WYSIWYG. *shudder*

So what you're saying is that you don't know how to code any more than the
average third grader, so you need a WYSIWYG to do it for you? There is NOTHING
that any WYSIWYG can do that can't be done better in a text editor. I've written full
Windows programs that get about as complex as you can get, like hacking a foreign
objects vtable, and doing custom encryption onboard the video card, all in a text editor.
hell, you want the ultimate example? Linux. The friggin OS that serves up your PHP
script kiddie stuff is written using guess what - a text editor.

You know why real developers who actually read the books and take the classes use text editors?
Because they know enough that they can write quality code and need the control over the code
that only a text editor can give you. You love Dreamweaver because it makes pretty things
dance around, great. That's awesome. Your beloved Dreamweaver was itself written using a
text editor.

:winkwink: True :thumbsup