CoffeeCup HTML Editor Software Review

CoffeeCup software may not have the same brand-name recognition as similar products from Microsoft and Adobe, but when it comes to HTML editors, they still have a very solid place in the market. Their latest product in this category, CoffeeCup HTML Editor 2008, is a huge push forward into the web design market, appearing to be an attempt to place the software in direct competition with Expression Web and Dreamweaver.

Features and User Interface

CoffeeCup HTML Editor includes a number of new features and enhancements not available in previous HTML editors released by CoffeeCup Software. One of the major additions is the new HTML and CSS Code Completion feature. This isn’t simply an auto-complete mechanism. As you begin to type an HTML tag or CSS property, the software provides a list of commands that you can choose from to complete your typing. This is great for those times when you can’t remember the exact name of a tag or property. Not only does the editor help you guess what you’re trying to do, it will close the chosen tag as well.

Users of other HTML editors, especially Expression Web and Dreamweaver, will appreciate the Code Editor, Visual Editor, and Preview windows. For the most part, navigation between these windows is similar to what is found in Expression Web and Dreamweaver. There are, however, some minor differences that just might be enough to make you flinch a bit.

One major difference is that you have to save the file before you can navigate from the Code Editor to the Visual Editor window. For people like me who go back and forth between these screens a lot, this can get annoying fast. In fact, I usually don’t want to save before checking things in both places. Forcing me to save at this point just causes an accumulation of dummy files in my directory that I neither want nor need.

On top of this, there is no option to split the screen into half code editor, half visual editor. This is probably related to the same reasoning that prevents navigating between the code and visual editors without saving first, but the lack of this feature really puts a dampener on my productivity when designing. The option of being able to seamlessly maneuver between a visual editor and code editor is the whole reason I purchase fancy HTML editors.

Making up slightly for this point, there is an option to split the screen into half code editor, half preview mode. It’s not quite the same thing, but at least there is some mechanism for seeing the results of your code as you type it, without having to save a copy of your file every thirteen seconds.