Coda

Coda is awesome. Here's a quick way to make it awesomer: invisible visible invisible characters!

Coda lets you show all the newlines, tabs and spaces, which comes in handy. But the default settings are pretty distracting. If you change the invisible character display color to match the background, they only show up when you select text.

First do this:

Then change this:

And rock out like this:

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.

Some sample docblocks after the jump.