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Some HomeSite Replacement Help?

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Jimdoria:
Hi everybody -

I used to use Allaire HomeSite as an HTML editor. I wasn't crazy about the bloated size, slow load times, or the annoyances that came with it, but it had a few features that made it super-valuable. The biggest were its handling of snippets and keyboard shortcuts.

A snippet was a custom text block or a pair of custom text blocks. Think HTML or BBCode tags as a start. For example, you could define a snippet to start with the (tr)(td) tags, and end with the (/td)(/tr) tags. Then whatever you had highlighted when you applied the snippet would be placed inside those tags, effectively making it into a table row.

This went hand-in-hand with ultra flexible keyboard shortcuts. There were intuitive defaults; Ctrl-B was mapped to the (b)(/b) tags, Ctrl-I was mapped to the (i)(/i) tags, etc. But I could also assign Ctrl-T to my table row snippet if I wanted. Any keyboard shortcut could be re-assigned this way, to either a program command or a text snippet. (My other faves were Ctrl-Space to insert the non-breaking space escape code and Ctrl-Quotes to insert the quotation mark escape code.)

Once set up, using the snippets and shortcuts made editing raw HTML almost as easy as regular word processing.

These days I use Notepad + + as my default HTML editor, and while I think it's mostly terrific, it doesn't have these two killer features (that I can see.) It has other stuff I consider essential, though, like color-coding of HTML code, flexible and capable search & replace, etc.

Does anyone here know of a text editor akin to Notepad + + that also has full keyboard customizability and text snippet support? I figured if anybody knew of such a beast, it would be someone here!

Thanks in advance!  :Thmbsup:

lanux128:
how about PSPad or NoteTab? i have used both and NoteTab in particular has a feature called ClipBook with its own scripting language that can be used for quick text insertion, formatting and many other uses.. :)

• http://www.pspad.com/en/
• http://www.notetab.com/

iphigenie:
Free editors:
Context has macro and snippets, but i don't use it for HTML much. Not sure why. when i need free and html i tended to use pspad (which has templates which partly work as snippets). Neither are similar to homesite though, although pspad might be closer.

shareware:
for more html oriented work i tended to use shareware - coffee cup's editor is pretty good (link: http://www.coffeecup.com/html-editor/), and so is visisoft's aceHTML (link: http://software.visicommedia.com/en/products/acehtml), both are clearly inspired by homesite and worth a try since both are actively developed. The first has more wizards and help tools, the second is probably more customisable. One of my friends likes firstpage, which is very homesitey too (link: http://www.evrsoft.com/1stpage3.shtml) but i havent tried it since 2004

But in the end I often end up in topstyle pro, in spite of it not having much help to speed up typing of HTML, because i do a lot of CSS.

wreckedcarzz:
I don't get into HTML much (or BBCode at all) but you may want to try Nvu http://www.nvu.com/index.php I use it and it seems to have a lot of advanced features, I just don't get into them. Might have what you have been missing. :-\

rssapphire:
I used to use Allaire HomeSite as an HTML editor.
-Jimdoria (July 27, 2007, 09:30 PM)
--- End quote ---

I still am. I keep trying other HTML editors (from freeware to every new version of Dreamweaver), but always end up going back to Homesite 5.5. It hasn't been updated in 4 years or so, but it is still has the feature set I need.

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