When comparing SciTE vs Coda, the Slant community recommends Coda for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors for a Mac with a GUI?” Coda is ranked 19th while SciTE is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose Coda is:
Makes styling a site in CSS simpler.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Flexible
It's property files allow for fine tweaks of its behavior, at a global or per language / project level. These textual settings might be confusing for those used to preference dialogs, but prove to be powerful, flexible, and fine grained.
Pro Lightweight
With less than 2 MB of binary on Windows, SciTE starts instantly. Plus, if you don't need all the config, syntax files, blah, there's a 678k standalone .exe version. Nothing is going to beat that for lightweight and start-up times. Stick it in a folder that is already on your PATH.
Pro Powerful
Based on the Scintilla source code editor, SciTE has some advanced features like rectangular editing, simple regular expression search and replace, code folding, etc. It allows the user to launch a compiler or interpreter, and it can also interpret the error messages, jumping at the location they point to.
Lua scripting is key to SciTE's power and flexibility. The Lua scripting language can be used to perform complex text transformations. It's relatively simple syntax and its large user-base makes it a great choice for a scripting feature.
Pro Built-in shell
The console window can show the result of ran commands (like build current file, reporting warnings, and errors), but also accept interactive shell commands.
Pro Portable
SciTE works on Windows and Linux, and it also has a commercial port on MacOS.
Pro Powerful syntax highlighting for numerous languages
Lexers providing folding and syntax highlighting are based on code, not on regular expressions. They support context, nesting, special rules, etc.
Pro Free (except on Mac) and open source
SciTE is written in C++, with lot of contributors, both to the core and to the numerous lexers.
Pro GUI
Has a simple graphical user interface
Pro Live Preview mode
Makes styling a site in CSS simpler.
Pro Built-in FTP client
Publishing your changes to the web server is a one-click operation. That is, one click per file, or one click for all your changed files. Or even cherry-pick the files to be published in the next batch.
Pro Built-in support for Git and Subversion
Although the software doesn't ship with these libraries, it does work once you have one installed.
Pro Mature
Coda has been developed by Panic exclusively for Mac since 2007. The experience of the developers shows in the stability and polish of their product.
Pro Many plugins available
There is a huge library of user-created plugins, ranging from additional syntax modes, to code validation and beautification, to reference materials, code snippets, text actions and more.
Cons
Con Hard to config
The configuration is mainly a file-based config, which can be unintuitive and difficult to use for new users.
Con Missing file browser
SciTE's greatest weakness is perhaps the file browser. It does not really have one, just a poor substitute which works a little bit like a terminal window with ls
or dir
commands to show the files in a directory.
Con Customization
No extensions, Themes.
Con Hasn't been updated in 2 years.
Con Expensive
The price of $99 is more than many other editors.