Aptana Studio Community 2.0.5

00:00 Feb 23, 2010

Aptana is a great web editor for anyone using HTML, CSS and Javascript in their websites. While it doesn't offer the split code/design view of editors such as Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web it has lots of helpful tools.

The editor window itself uses colour coding to identify the different commands and highlights both the opening and closing tags, another way of quickly finding errors in code. It offers help for completing tags. This is another helpful timesaver if you cannot quite remember the options that can be used, or are required. The line number section also includes markers when there are syntax errors in the code.

Sections of code can be collapsed to help reduce the amount of text onscreen at any one time. The font and colours can all be changed if you want. For example you might want to use a better fixed space font such as Inconsolata.

Aptana Studio can be extended with many different plug ins. These include some very popular and power Javascript libraries that can be incorporated into your web projects such as the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) libraries. These can be selected when a new project is created.

The code can be previewed in Aptana Studio in different tabs. Aptana Studio can use several different browser engines, a vital tool for checking for incompatibilities. Although there is no HTML editor it is possible to create a split view between the code and the preview. Click on the Window menu and then Preferences. Expand the Aptana option and then click on HTML. Select the 'Horizontal Split View' option and click on OK. There is a vertically split view option as well.

A full ftp tool is built into Aptana so there is no need to use extra software for transferring the website to the live website.

Note that the download here is for Windows users. A version for Linux and Mac OS X is available from the Aptana website.