Subscribe to RSS feedThe web development tools I use
By Martin / Other / Tuesday June 29th, 2010 / 2 comments
There are a wide variety of web development applications available, from simple plain text editors, like Notepad, to all-in-one IDEs like Dreamweaver and Coda. Everyone has their own needs and preferences, but these are the tools I find myself using most of the time.
Editor - PSPad
A great text editor, lightweight, but still very capable. In particular, it has the ability to "multi-highlight" documents - that is, recognise areas of different languages within a single document, such as HTML and PHP, and highlight each area accordingly. The applications also has integrated project management and file transfer utilities, and a great set of plug-ins. The file browser could do with a bit of work, though.
FTP - FileZilla
Another very lightweight application. Simple to use, but it has all the features you would need for everyday FTP access. It also has solid secure FTP (SFTP) support, which everyone should be using.
SSH - PuTTY
Probably the only good graphical telnet and SSH client for Windows. Almost everything that you could need or want to do over SSH can be done from the PuTTY interface - it can handle port forwarding, proxies, numerous different encryption schemes, and even emulate different types of terminals. And, if you need even more than what PuTTY has to offer by itself, there are many, many forks available that add numerous new features.
Browser - Chrome (primary)
While of course websites should be tested in all user agents that your target audience may use (which, in some extreme cases, may be only IE6), I find that I tend to use Chrome more than any other as my primary browser. It's fast and simple, and the Webkit Inspector (developer tools) is powerful enough to rival Firebug. Best of all, it has an extensive amount of extensions.
Of course, there are many other applications that I use for specific purposes, like TortoiseSVN for Subversion access, and grepWin for batch search-and-replace, but most of my time is spent in the above four programs.
What web development tools do you find yourself using?
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2 comments
boen_robot Editor - NetBeans
FTP - FileZilla (though most oftenly, I just use the automatic FTP upload in NetBeans).
SSH - WinSCP if there is a file system (SFTP and the like), and PuTTY if I only need a command line.
Browser - IE8. That's mostly due to my primary job, which is not a web developer, but in IT. I need to keep my knowledge of IE fresh, because that's what people use. I know that if I start to get crashes due to an add on, I'll have clients with the same issue, and I'll need to solve it for them like I've had for myself... and no... migrating to another browser is often not an option, mostly due to various ActiveX controls.
23.12.2012 Editor - Vim
FTP - Transmit 4
SSH - ssh command in the Terminal
Browser - Chrome, mainly for Vimium
Source Versioning - Git and Hg