So I am not a fan of the subscription model. If I am paying money for something, I want to own it. I understand the appeal for the subscription model, especially with the development houses, but I want the option to just buy it once and that be it! So I am going to be writing some posts over the next year where I will be reviewing some of my favorite alternatives to popular subscription services.

The first one that I will be tackleing will be Adobe Dreamweaver. Yup! So for this I actually have two parts. I personally use vim to write most of my code, so when I am making a site with Jekyll or something in PHP or Rails, I use vim (Or rather Neovim). This is free, open source, software…but I do enjoy a little help when building html and CSS. For that, my tool of choice here is https://espressoapp.com/. It’s a really great app that lets you preview your site in app while you are editing…but even more so, there is neat tool they call X-ray that lets you interact with a web inspector tool and dig a little deeper into your CSS. Prefer to use less or sass? Espresso can handle that as well. Technically, it had plugins for handling syntax of other languages as well. You can code Javascript, PHP and even Ruby. Not my cup of tea, but you are more then welcome to use it for more then just CSS if you want to.

A few little tricks that I just do not use, Espresso can sync your code between local and a remote server. I currently use Git and Github Actions for pretty much everything I deploy right now, so I do not use SFTP….but I have in the past and this looks like a VERY cool feature.

Espresso also has some other tricks that I currently do not use, but look useful! If you do you a workflow to compile JS and Less/Sass, Espresso seems to be able to take care of that before previewing the site internally!! :)

At just $99, Espresso is a steal!!