HTML Editor Reviews | Reviews and Discussion of (X)HTML Coding Tools

Celebrity Interview: Cameron Adams

Cameron Adams (The Man in Blue) has a degree in law and one in science; naturally he chose a career in Web development. When pressed, he labels himself a “Web Technologist” because he likes to have a hand in graphic design, JavaScript, CSS, Perl (yes, Perl), and anything else that takes his fancy on a given morning. He has written a book – The JavaScript Anthology – which is one of the most complete question and answer resources on modern JavaScript techniques. Cameron lives in Melbourne, Australia, where – between coding marathons – he likes to play soccer and mix some tunes for his irate neighbours.

1. What OS/platform do you primarily develop in?

Windows 2000 on my desktop (which I use most of the time) because I don’t want all the cruft that XP has to offer. On my laptop I use OSX 10.something — who knows?

2. What’s your (X)HTML editor of choice for coding websites?

On Windows it’s definitely TextPad. If I’m on the Mac, dunno … BBEdit by default I suppose. Though sometimes I’ll jump into vi through the terminal — I’ve become pretty adept at using all its keyboard shortcuts through years spent inside Linux shells.

3. How did you decide on this as your primary editor?

A good question … I used to use Dreamweaver, but if you just want to do a bit of text editing, what’s the point in waiting 30 seconds for it to load, and what’s the point in having a $400 text editor?

I think someone at my old work was using TextPad, so I tried it out and liked it. You know how it goes: Once you become comfortable with something, your experience with it becomes a barrier to any newcomers, so anything else I’ve tried just hasn’t felt right.

4. What’s the one (or more) feature of the software you couldn’t live without?

Word wrapping. Seriously. It wraps lines well, making my code readable when I start coding 200+ character-long regular expressions, indented accordingly with the parent line. BBEdit does a shocking job at this … or maybe I just can’t find the right setting.

5. If you were in charge of choosing new features for this piece of software, what feature(s) would you add?

I would add auto-correction of my common spelling mistakes. I’m always typing “backgorund” in my CSS. vi has a file where you can specify automatic substitution for typos like this, but I haven’t seen that in another editor.

Code snippets also sound good. I have no idea what they are, but everyone else mentions them, so I have to have them!

6. Bonus Unrelated Question: What’s the best book you’ve read in the last year?

Best book? Mr. Sneeze (.com|.ca)

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