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Posts on Dreamweaver

Sept 2, 2015

Trying something new

We used Dreamweaver almost exclusively through school. I got comfortable with it, understood the file organization and found some of its helps helpful. But we've gone through a lot of changes in the last year, some personal, some technical. One resulted in swapping computers with my husband and the laptop I now use was affected by the GPU recall Apple issued a few months back. Even after being replaced it still has quirks and doesn't seem to have the power it should have. I've been experiencing a lot of Dreamweaver crashes and every use the first save causes my computer to freeze for forever, or several minutes, whichever is longer. After the initial save it seems to work fine.

That was the driving force that got me searching for something lighter. The personal changes kept me away from coding for many months, and subsequently I decided that Dreamweaver was a little too helpful ( thanks autocomplete ), resulting in lazy coding and a hazy memory of proper structure and known functions. And finally, I've started using Github and wow, additional file bloat!

My new process seems to be working much more smoothly. I landed on TextWrangler as my chosen editor and have learned to replicate the Dreamweaver helps I most appreciated -- brace balancing, multiple line indenting ( shift left using cmd+[ or right using cmd+] ), and enough color coding to hint whether I've mistyped something. And then I rely on two Terminal windows to perform my Github commands and SFTP my files to the server. If I need to upload or download more than a few files at a time, I'll open FileZilla.

It's been several weeks since I felt I *had* to open Dreamweaver and I'm a happy camper. I have more freedom in my file structure, being able to work with my local development server and send that same file to my remote web testing area and Github without having to keep multiple directories in sync so that Dreamweaver stays happy is an added plus. Also, less GUI makes you look smarter, right?