Panic’s Coda is my current favorite editor. It’s not perfect yet, but they just keep making it better. Coda 1.6 and later support a great plug-in architecture that allows users to tweak the editor’s functionality to match their own needs and coding style.

Plug-ins have access to the text of the current document and can perform modifications on it as desired. For example, you could write a plug-in to insert the current date and time into your document, change the case of selected text, run code through a custom validator, or even wrap code with a special tag.

These plug-ins are pretty rad, let me tell you.

One of the things I missed most when I started using Coda was the ability to magically generate docblocks. You see, I’m absolutely horrid at writing documentation. With semi-automatic docblocks, writing documentation has a ton less friction so I find myself doing it more.

The new plug-in architecture lends itself well to things like that, so I decided to write a docblock generator. You can download my PHP docblock plug-in here:

Give it a spin, let me know where you’d like to see improvements. And be sure to check out the rest of the awesome plug-ins available over at Panic.