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

Review: HTML-Kit 1.0

While first impressions can certainly be wrong, people often don’t have the time — for whatever reason — to properly evaluate things beyond their first, critical encounters with them, and software is no exception. In fact, because we tend to judge software on its ability to help us get our work done more quickly or easily, it’s essential for the software to put its best foot forward, so to speak. Many developers don’t seem to understand this and, as a result, don’t properly show off the features that make their software stand out — much to the detriment of themselves and their potential users.

If you take a look at the TextMate website, there are excellent screen-casts and links to user-made tutorials/cheatsheets (this screen-cast [8MB] in particular sold me on TextMate as an HTML editor). The WeBuilder website has a great screenshot tour, guiding potential users through many of the product’s features (which is how I knew I wanted to try it in place of TopStyle). The HTML-Kit website, on the other hand, and even the editor itself to a certain extent, doesn’t exhibit this same kind of user-friendliness: There’s too much information presented to the user at first sight, making it somewhat difficult to get a handle on the program. Moreover, the information isn’t geared to first-time users; you have to download the program and play around or scour the internet for tutorials to learn what HTML-Kit can (and can’t) do. In the end, neither the editor nor its website made me want to divest too much energy in becoming familiar with the multitude of plug-ins and program options, which is too bad considering it’s one of the most popular freeware editors around.

What I Like

• HTML-Kit is extremely configurable with lots of add-ons (over 440, according to the website). Looking at the Preferences tabs the first few times, however, is a bit intimidating as a result.
• Plug-ins are very easy to install — you don’t even have to unzip them. It would be nice if, when necessary, HTML-Kit restarted itself automatically, though.
• Code hinting for HTML.
• Go To Matching Tag. Awesome for matching that closing div tag you forgot to label.
• Time Tracker. I haven’t seen this before in an editor. Once enabled, HTML-Kit’s time tracker monitors how much time is spent editing files based on keyboard and mouse input. No more gouging accidentally overcharging clients. ;)
• It’s free!

Gripes

• Only basic CSS support. There’s the Styles action bar, but no code hinting. As well, by default, HTML-Kit looks for TopStyle Lite to create new style sheets. As an added annoyance, I couldn’t figure out how to easily switch this to another program, such as TopStyle Pro (which would negate HTML-Kit, I suppose) or Style Master, both of which are installed on my machine.
• PHP (insert your server-side language here) support is limited in the same way as CSS support. However, you can download plug-ins to add an Action bar for PHP.
• Help docs are online. For most people, this won’t be a problem, but I’m on dial-up. I don’t want to have to connect to the internet just to read a help file.
• The icons on the Action bar are difficult to read/understand because of their small size. This makes for some usability problems on occasion, though the program does offer a very good number of actions to choose from.
• Snippets are a bit basic; they just allow you to save a snippet of text/code. There are no replacement tokens or anything analogous.
• The File Explorer is set by default to show Templates, Snippets, and My Documents — no other folders — and right-clicking doesn’t bring up a terribly helpful menu for changing these options. In fact, I couldn’t figure out how to add any other folders, making the File Explorer pretty useless to me, since I don’t store my sites in My Documents. UPDATE: Thanks to m13b below in the comments for pointing out how to add a folder to the File Explorer.
• There seems to be no Projects option. In other words, I couldn’t specify a specific folder to be a project. Not very handy.
• Currently, HTML-Kit doesn’t highlight server-side syntax within an HTML attribute.
• No code folding. Not a big deal, but it’s become so ubiquitous…

Wish List

• Better CSS and server-side support, including code hinting.
• More polished interface.
• Offline help files.
• More robust snippets.
• Better File Explorer/Project Manager.

Overall

HTML-Kit certainly isn’t a bad program. In fact, it’s quite good, depending on how you like to build your websites. Moreover, judging by the HTML-Kit website, version 2 of the program is going to include some great new features that will make HTML-Kit even more useful. Unfortunately, you can’t rank an editor based on what it will become, only on what it is. It’s for this reason I can’t really recommend HTML-Kit at this time. I am, however, looking forward to the next major update.

21 Comments

1. Good review, right along the lines of what I expected. However, I was really surprised by the comment about File Explorer. It’s the single biggest reason I use the program, as it allows you to open multiple FTP sites simultaneously and work with their files. Right click in a blank part of the File Explorer sidebar, then choose “Add/Remove FTP/Folder”, and then to either add an FTP location or a local file folder. Admittedly, things should be more intuitive, and a lot of your gripes are dead on. I don’t use any of the features myself, just give me multiple FTP sessions and syntax highlighting, and I’m a happy guy.

   Comment by m13b — June 12, 2006 @ 2:05 pm

2. m13b: I completely overlooked “Add/Remove FTP/Folder” because I thought it was strictly FTP-related. Thanks for pointing this out.

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