Which is the best alternative for Dreamweaver in Mac?

Question

I'm looking for a few freeware alternatives to Dreamweaver that I can use in my Mac that runs on OS X Lion. Shoot the best free, website development applications you know?

Answer 1

Adobe Dreamweaver (for Mac) — $399

As Andrew Larsson said, there is Mac version for latest Adobe Dreamweaver (url is the same as for Windows version).

If it's a tool that you like and already own, but it's not supported by Mac, then you may try to make it work under OSX using Parallels or wine. Some people made different Dreamweaver versions to work on wine (on linux), so you may try to install wine on Mac and then install Dreamweaver in this case.

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Fraise

Easiest and most user friendly editor I've found so far is Fraise. It is small and nice, there's no 'workspaces' like in Eclipse and key-combinations like in Eclipse and Vim. It just stays out of your way and allows to edit HTML (there is preview window for it), CSS, and a lot of other file formats. I haven't seen yet any possibility of code-completion, but is it a big deal?

Ironically you may need to build it from source (but it's very and fast if you know how to use git and Xcode)

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Quanta Plus

They say that it supports both code editing and WYSIWYG and it definitely works on OSX so you may like it. I've never tried it though.

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There are also at least 2 tools based on Eclipse that you can use for web development:

Eclipse IDE for JavaScript Web Developers

It incluses tools for JavaScript developers creating Web applications, including a JavaScript IDE, tools for JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and XML.

As alternative you can install any other eclipse but make sure that it contains Web Tools or install them in eclipse of your choice:

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Aptana Studio

It's also based on Eclipse. Besides HTML, CSS and JavaScript it supports server-site scripting languages (Ruby, Python, PHP). You can preview web pages you edit in built-in browser, but I don't know if it is possible to edit webpages visually in Elipse based IDEs.

Answer 2

vim or MacVim

Vi is already installed on your machine, and you can get to it by using the Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and typing vim.

MacVim gives you a few extra features:

MacVim supports multiple windows with tabbed editing and a host of other features such as:

• bindings to standard OS X keyboard shortcuts (⌘Z, ⌘V, ⌘A, ⌘G, etc.)
• transparent backgrounds
• full-screen mode
• multibyte editing with OS X input methods and automatic font substitution
• ODB editor support

Answer 3

You should look at 'Aptana Studio', currently at Version 3, which is the best free Web-Development Plattform. It's based on the Eclipse Framework, so it's probably not everybodys taste. I think it's a bit sluggish, which is why i bought 'Coda'.

Answer 4

This question is a bit vague — it depends on how you use Dreamweaver. Which Dreamweaver features are important to you? Which ones do you not need?

If you don’t use the WYSIWYG editor (you shouldn’t!) and you’re just looking for a great IDE / code editor, then Sublime Text 2 might be of interest. It’s currently in beta and free (although you can pay to register if you want). It’s highly customizable, too.

Answer 5

As already noted, this question is a bit vague. So I don't know if you want a WYSIWYG editor or not. So, I'll mention Panic's Coda.

It's a great code editor that supports syntax highlighting and (and my personal favorite) auto fill. It will automatically fill in as you type:

The other thing is that it has an FTP client built-right into it. This is a great application and well worth $100 you spend for it.

Answer 6

There's also CodeKit. It's new and I'm not overly familiar with its capabilities, but thought I should include it for completeness.