Review: XHTMLSoft SEEdit
- Article 14 of 89
- MacFormat, May 2006
Why pay $199 for BBEdit when there's SEEdit?
When it comes to hand-coding web pages, BBEdit is the application to beat. Full of validation, highlighting and management tools, it's the program every hard-core web developer keeps on hand to ensure his or her web pages meet the highest standards in the least amount of time.
But it's $199. This puts it way outside most people's budget range. So for anyone who would really like BBEdit, but who can't afford it or who doesn't need all the tools, SEEdit should be the first item on their shopping list. A snap at $29.95, SEEdit is an HTML and XHTML editor that includes many of the tools that make BBEdit so valuable - as well as a certain 'similarity' of interface and a few functions of its own that would improve BBEdit.
At SEEdit's foundation is a basic text editor that still puts many other applications' to shame. Add to that Unicode support, standard syntax highlighting, code libraries, a Tag Editor for showing you which attributes can be added to the current tag, a link checker, a code tidier that validates your code and a live rendering window. The latter, based on Safari's WebKit, shows you exactly how your web page looks whenever you've saved any changes, without recourse to an external browser.
Add to that mixture a robust templating system, a filename fixer, a CSS class picker, palettes for adding HTML entities and Unicode characters, and a text case converter and you've got a pretty powerful tool by anyone's measure. While it misses out on some of BBEdit's more powerful functions, such as its site management tools and support for scripting languages, these are not serious shortcomings for most people's purposes.
The program's not perfect. The Undo function is pretty useless; the interface has had some bad translation; and it employs an arcane file structure in your site for handling code snippets and templates that makes its "Clean up to FTP" function an unfortunate necessity. But at the asking price, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better tool; it'll certainly make you think twice about BBEdit.