Okay, I’m over the hot emotions from yesterday’s (or this morning’s) Dreamweaver “experience,” but in reexamining my Dreamweaver ban I don’t really see any loss of productivity. I do about 95% of my coding by hand, usually in HomeSite, but in the past I’ve found Dreamweaver to be useful for times when I’m cutting/pasting large amounts of text, or putting images in, but I have to admit that is easier to simply to just drag an image onto the page then manually typing the tag with the image diminsions, etcetera. But these are all things are available in Homesite, albiet hidden under some dialogs.

Anyway, today I begin my quest for the perfect editor. I want a small, fast, and easy-to-use marvel of programming that will make the most arduous tasks a breeze and not bother me with unecessary fluff. Thinking back there were several things I liked about editing code in DW, specifically the code hints that would come up, allowing you to enter things without actually typing them. I liked how when you used a PHP function it would tell you the proper attributes, and their order; I liked the way you could glance at things in design mode to make sure everything was kosher, and it would even pull include() files in, a templating technique I use quite a bit. So in addition to all that, here is my wishlist for this editor I will find:

• Full Regex suport/Robust search and replace
• PHP syntax highlighting and context tips
• Small footprint.
• Tons of keyboard shortcuts
• All generated markup should be XHTML
• Nice file browsing mechanism
• Server mapping support
• Thought completion (j/k)
• Good support, quick bugfixes

If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.