Things I miss from Dreamweaver (in Eclipse / CFeclipse / Aptana)
yes there are a few... I've been DW-free and 100% eclipse-coding for about a year now I think... and I still find myself wishing for just a few of the features that were in DW. Maybe they'll be in 'ColdFusion Builder' ... maybe they already exist in eclipse and I'm not looking at it correctly.
My workspace is currently Eclipse 3.4 w/ CFeclipse plugins and Aptana code editor. The perspective I work in is largely Aptana's default w/ some stuff moved around.
Anyway, here's my short list of things I wish I had in my daily IDE :
- Highlighted Tag Matching. Yes there is a bit of that in my eclipse/cfeclipse build, i.e. 'jump to matching tag', but in DW I could hit a key combo that would highlight the tag and its contents, and with another keystroke, jump to the parent matching tag, expanding outward. Then I could collapse that section - or any section I want - among other things. I miss that.
- (smarter) Tag Completion: In eclipse, I can type <p> and it puts the closing </p> right after. That's great. But in DW, I could type <p> then a big long sentence and then simple ' </ ' ... and it would know to put the closing 'p>' in there for me. Same for /div>, whatever. That was cool.
- Last Modified Dates /. 2-part FTP Panel: I love eclipse's "project" view, where i can have any number of projects in a single scrolling pane without flipping back and forth like DW's 'sites' system. Awesome. And the built-in FTP w/ Aptana is much faster and more reliable for me than DW ever was (this was the main reason i finally forced myself to become friendly w/ eclipse after years as a die-hard DW user). But sometimes I really miss the expanded FTP view from DW, where i could see files on the local server as well as the remote, with last-modified dates and everything. I still suspect this lurks in eclipse but have not found the right 'view' as of yet.
- User Defined Keyboard Shortcuts: this is a BIG one. Snippet shortcuts are awesome, but still not quite the same as being able to set my own key combos on any menu or window item.
No chance I'll be going back to DW any time soon (or ever) - there's too much in Eclipse that I would not only miss but become less productive if I did not have. For the most part I have a great, stable (and free!) web coding system in place, but these are the main features I find myself missing. My hands get tired after 12-hour coding days - every little auto-completed key-shortcutable item counts! - and when going between windows and views, I wish I didn't have to use the mouse so much.
I'm curious to hear from other DW-to Eclipse converts... what's your wish list for Eclipse?
Also I can't connect to my RDS server using https:// which I could do years ago in CFStudio 5.
One thing that bugs me about Eclipse though is that it's pretty self contained. I'll explain what I mean. In order to open a file it has to be inside an existing project. Eclipse doesn't work like a regular text editor and let you just open any file on the HD. Chances are all your web site files are probably grouped together inside a folder anyway, but what if you just want to open some random file that's not within the project? Can't do it.
This is this very same thing that prevents me from making Eclipse the default system editor for .cfm/.htm/.js files. If I double click a file, I'd like to have Eclipse open it. For whatever reason, the OS won't recognize it as an editor for any file types. So what I do to get around this is always have Dreamweaver open in case the OS uses it to open a file, or if I want a more lightweight editor I'll go with TextWrangler. Mac OS's default TextEdit is another option, but looking at CF code without any code coloring is scary.
Regarding specific Dreamweaver features, I'm not sure Eclipse is going to have any sort of plug-in to handle link management any time soon. With Dreamweaver, if I choose to delete a file it'll at least tell me if any other pages are linking to it via img tags, href links, or even cfincludes.
The "Apply Source Formatting" is also a nice feature I kind of miss. Every now and then I run into some code that was put together by someone else, and it was either indented poorly or the line breaks got messed up somehow. Apply Source Formatting will fix that in a snap.
One step file uploading in Dreamweaver is also missed. I've heard there are ways of FTPing in Eclipse. I would need WebDAV support in addition to FTP for where I work. To get around this, I paid for the shareware app Transmit. With it I can drag and drop from Eclipse straight to the Transmit icon on the Dock, and it will figure out where to properly place it on the server. Easy enough.
The other day I had some poorly nested CFIF tags, and I could not for the life of me figure out which line was missing the end /CFIF. Couldn't figure it out with Eclipse. Dreamweaver at least gives the option to highlight any tag blogs from beginning to end.
I could probably continue adding to this list. Suffice it to say, I still get a fair amount of work done using Eclipse alone, so it's only on occasion where I have to go back to Dreamweaver to fill in the gaps.
Another thing I wish Eclipse had was a BETTER Find feature. I love DW's Find, particularly "find all in local site" where it gives you a nice list of all the files, as well as a snippet of the code where your search term is found, even if it's found multiple times in a file.
And for me, it's more of a Eclipse to DW rather than DW to Eclipse. I still use Eclipse for all my "side" work, but in DW, I miss some of the Eclipse keystrokes, like Ctrl-D to delete a line, Ctrl-Shift-M to comment out a selected block of code, etc. If DW has the ability for me to add this, I'd sure love to know how.
U could use SubVersion to mimic that to some extent , then write a HOOK to PUSH on Update.
--DW's Find, particularly " find all in local site"--
Create a "Working Set" .? I use that all the way to define the particular mods to a specific code structure/set.
M.E. I new u were gonna do it!!! :)
Personally I'm not sure I could make the switch entirely - old habit/dogs and all that - but I am temted to install/run eclipse on my laptop for when I need to make site edits on the go.
Could never see myself running production on the laptop but also can't install mt CS3 suite as it is already on 2 other desktop production machines.