Working on a Mac I’ve had some great choices to choose from when considering which editor to code my sites in. Panic’s Coda, Macrabits Espresso, BBEdit, and my tool of choice Textmate. Now I didn’t arrive easily to this choice, in fact I swayed back-and-forth between Coda and Espresso for a while thinking each one did something the other missed. It was only when I was playing around with Ruby-on-Rails that I really gave it a go. And what was it that got me hooked? I think probably the power of the bundle engine, the ability to collapse lines of code, and the Railscast theme. The first is the real gem though, and is probably what isn’t immediately obvious when taking it for a test-drive. If your interested, there’s a video or two and a book that’ll really help get you up to speed and earn back your time.

But as great as it is, I think for web development we could do better. I know recently there’s been some work at trying to get a firebug-type editor that lets you code and save within the browser view, no more cmd + tabbing. And I was thinking you could take this one-step further and have a browser-switcher that would let you switch between an i.e., webkit, gecko, view to see how each responds to the code; it could even include some magic in-builds.