I find other people’s workflows to be fascinating. It’s not because I necessarily want to do what they do, we all do things differently, after all, but because there might be a step in their process that would help me in mine.

Because I have read so many workflow stories, I thought I’d publish mine, in case others like to read them too.

The short version is that I start in Ulysses, move to Atom, switch over to PhpStorm (with a side trip to Tower), and it all ends up on my server at Site5.

Brackets (backed by Adobe) and Atom (backed by GitHub), are two open-source code editors vying for the spot that Sublime Text is leaving in the market due to its glacial development rate.

And they are both interesting in that each uses traditional web development languages (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) to both create the interface, and to provide an API for developers to use to customize. Do you need to modify or create a syntax color scheme? CSS. Do you care to create a plug-in? JavaScript. Use the languages you already know as a web developer.

Perhaps I’m creating another chance to get flamed in the programming editor “religious wars” or in the “fight” over stand-alone tools versus IDEs (Integrated Development Environments), but I generally blog about what I’m working on. And right now, since I’ve gotten myself stuck on a feature I’m developing in Grav, I’ve been working on Atom and Coda configuration.

And Coda, combined with the tremendous support of its developer Panic, is drawing me back in, even after what I just wrote about Atom.

No, comparing Atom and Coda isn’t really fair. Coda is a full web development IDE (Integrated Development Environment) while Atom is a programming text editor. As an IDE, Coda comes with lots more than just the editor. But what if I just discuss how the two editors compare?

I’ve been using Coda for years. I have made a few detours to the likes of TextMate 2 (still stuck in beta after all this time), BBEdit (which I’ve owned since a MacWorld Expo in Boston many years ago) and Sublime Text, but I’ve always come back to Coda. It is perfectly Mac-like, well supported and extremely capable.