For the last ten years of my career in corporate America I used Adobe nee Macromedia Dreamweaver for a living. It sucked. There is not a webserver with enough storage capacity for me to list all of the things I hate about Dreamweaver, but I knew how to use it, and the support it offered for maintaining local and remote copies of a website had me addicted like a crack junkie. Once I retired and became a web hobbyist I kept using it out of habit, but it is a bad habit like smoking.
My frustration with the program I had begun calling Dreamwrecker was so bad that my husband had learned how to recognize a particular sigh of exasperation I made only when running Dreamwrecker.
With the advent of Leopard and Pages Dreamweaver was driving me insane with its extremely amateurish handling of focus, foreground, and active windows. It just sucks so badly I had to either find something else or give up web hosting. Thankfully I found Coda by Panic Software. Panic is well known for their widely used FTP and SFTP client Transmit.
One thing Coda has going for it is a well thought out minimalist approach. When you tell Coda to push a file up to your server (using SFTP because you are not an idiot) it does not pop a modal dialog box saying “Oh My God, Really?” it just does what it has been told to do. Instead of popping a dialog box and conveniently hiding it behind another window, Coda shows a small circle next to the file name which becomes filled by a rotating decoration as your file is uploaded. And it does not mess around writing teeny tiny empty directories named _notes all over your freaking hard drive either. If there was a God, I’d tell her how much I hate Dreamwrecker.
In some ways Coda is a bit lightweight, it seems impossible to get a file from the server and have it land anywhere except in the site root, that’s stupid, but I still have my delicious SFTP champion Yummy to use when I want files I transfer to land in the relevant target directory. Coda is OK doing uploads, it is just downloading files from the server where it currently falls short.
Editing files in Coda defaults righteously to code view, you can configure a local HTTP server on your Mac to preview files, but for PHP/MySQL based websites like blogs this quickly becomes a bad joke.
I looked at a few other HTML editors too, but I absolutely require SFTP support because real men don’t use FTP, and I also require a program that is conscious of sites and relative file structures between local and remote.
If you like to use slow and highly unreliable web services, Coda understands iDisks.
Another absolutely delicious feature in Coda is that you can SSH right into the domain you are working on as that user, and it even sweetly does a cd to your web root folder. All this with one mouse click on an SSH icon, and no idiotic dialog boxes to piss you off 
Still, with just a dash of eye candy and window/focus handling that is 100% consistent with other well-designed Mac applications, Coda has already reduced my stress level enormously. And it does not cost $500 like certain pieces of crap software that I have not used in over a week. What a glorious, wonderful week. I don’t think I have yelled Jesus H. Christ once all week!
If you already own Transmit you can get $10 off on Coda. It will do wonders for your blood pressure, honest.
Just say NO to industry leading crapware!
[tags]Coda, Dreamweaver, Panic Software, Transmit, Yummy FTP, escape, modal dialog, Adobe, Macromedia, crapware, Dreamwrecker [/tags]
