Panic Blog

Coda 2 is, as you probably know by now, a surprisingly capable app, and I’m here to help you get the most of it. My promise: give this post a few minutes of your time, and you’ll learn something you didn’t know about Coda 2! (If you don’t, I’ll send you a free tweet.)

1. Open A New File in a Split

After splitting your view in via the New Split button , there are three ways to open a new file in a fresh split. You can:

1. Option-Double-Click a file in the sidebar, pathbar, or Files tab
2. Drag any file to the pathbar of your freshly opened split
3. Right click a file and say “Open in Split”

Done!

Bonus Tip: Hold “Option” while clicking the New Split button to change the split direction to vertical. Or, change your default direction in the Prefs.

2. Use the Golden HTML + CSS + Live Preview Setup

It’s the dream view, easy as pie. First, open your HTML file. Second, click the New Split button, and choose New Untitled to get a blank split. Now, using Tip #1, open your CSS file in this new split (we like dragging files to the pathbar). Finally, click back in your first HTML split, click the New Split button again, and choose Preview.

That’s it. The best part: as you tweak your CSS, your changes will be applied live in the Preview!

3. Explore the Preferences

That reminds us — and, ok, this is a pretty lame tip — but we really recommend it: take a few minutes to check out each of the Preferences panels. You’ll likely find something you didn’t know you could do!

4. Create Site Groups

Just covering the basics: you do know that you can make Site Groups, right? To do so, simply drag a site onto another site. That’s it — just like in iOS, you can now open up the Site Group, re-arrange the members of that group, drag new items in, etc. Great for organizing jobs per client!

5. Use Text Tabs

First, did you know the tab bar was resizable? Just drag the bottom. Second, did you know that if you keep resizing the tab bar all the way down, Coda switches to space-saving Text Tabs?

6. Hide or Show Specific File Types

You don’t want to see all the hidden files littering your server. But you do want to see .htaccess files. Sure, you can turn on “Show Invisible Files”, but then it’s all or nothing, right?

Wrong! Click the Rules tab in Preferences, and you can have Coda show or hide certain types!

7. Preview in a Simulated iPhone/iPad

What happens when you change the “User Agent” in Preview to something iPhone/iPad related?  Unbelievably, this happens:

It’s just an approximation — and it’s comical if you try to use the web inspector in this view — but for mobile developers, it gives you a nice head start on layout.

To change the User Agent, just click the Preview gear menu in the bottom bar.

8. Access the Code Navigator in the Path Bar

You might already know about the Navigator, the handy Sidebar tool that lets you easily jump to pieces of your code.

But did you know that if you click the document name in the Path Bar, you can access the Navigator right then and there?

9. Add Custom Bookmarks to the Navigator

It’s fine and dandy to have your named HTML elements show up in the navigator, but what if you could add any line to it, like a bookmark? You totally can. In any syntax mode, just type a comment and prefix its contents with a !, like so:

/* !Page start */

Or, single-line-comment style:

// !Bookmark

It’ll then show up as a bookmark in the Code Navigator:

10. Quickly Jump to Line

Here’s a little one: double click the line number in the bottom bar, and you get a handy jump to line pop-up. (You can also hit ⌘⇧L.)

11. Discover the Books

Ok, so our built-in Books aren’t quite a “Secret”, but they’re so dramatically overhauled in Coda 2 that I really don’t want you to miss them.

To add a book to your tabs, click the Tab Plus, then Book. Try the HTML book — it’s an extremely efficient and fast way to quickly get reference.

Bonus Tip: our docs are available online, anywhere. Check out HTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript.

12. Browse CSS Styles Inline

If you’re like me, you often forget a lot of CSS rules. The solution? When starting a new, blank line in a CSS style declaration, open the autocomplete menu by hitting Esc (or Option+Esc or F5) and choose the Styles pop, and you get this:

Handy!

13. Preview in a New Window

Got a huge screen? Click the Preview gear menu, and choose Preview In ▸ New Window.

14. Quickly Wrap Text in a Tag

Type some text. Select it. Then choose Text ▸ Wrap in Tag or hit ⌘< and behold: an instant tag. But it’s just a <div> tag, right? Wrong. Notice that the “div” is already selected. Now, whatever you type will be inserted into the opening and closing tag, simultaneously, automatically!

15. Blockedit Multiple Lines at Once

Quickly make changes to multiple lines at once. To do so, hold Option while dragging a text selection. Now, type within that selection. Any text is applied to all lines!

Hit “Escape” to clear your blockedit selection. In the future, there’s even more we hope to do here.

16. Use Quick Open

If you’re working locally, quickly open any file by clicking the Quick Open button on the left of the Path Bar. Type a few letters, and bam: there are your relevant files. You can also open this window with Control-Q. Repeat, Control-Q.

17. Discover the Text Processing Menu

Need to quickly encode accents? Remove line breaks? Don’t miss the Text ▸ Processing menu!

18. Drag Your Favorite Folders to Places

Have a folder you use a lot in a certain Site? Open Places in the sidebar, and just drag it in. Places acts as a per-site “favorites” for your most-used folders.

19. Quickly Jump to CSS in Preview

(Note: this tip requires Coda 2.0.2 or newer, which is coming soon.)

You can now instantly jump from Preview to a relevant piece of your CSS with a simple right click.

Best of all: if you don’t have the relevant CSS file open, we’ll even open it for you!

20. Bonus Tip: Customize Keyboard Shortcuts

It’s possibly one of the greatest hidden features in Mac OS X, and works for almost all apps.

First, open System Preferences ▸ Keyboard, and click Keyboard Shortcuts.

Now, select “Application Shortcuts” on the left, and click the “Plus” .

From the pop-up menu, choose Coda 2. Now, let’s type in “Something…”, and give it the shortcut of our choosing!

(If the menu item uses an ellipsis, it’s important that you use one here! Hit Option-Semicolon to type it.)

That’s it! Without even having to relaunch Coda, your shortcut has been added.

Enjoy the hot tips!

It’s been two weeks since we shipped two major apps, and it’s been a whirlwind. But before I forget, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to take a moment to say thanks to the small team of incredibly smart and talented people made Coda 2 and Diet Coda possible.

Coda 2 was led by Wade and Will, who care about every line of code in what has become a very complex app. Dan and Logan joined later, and pushed the finished product into greatness. Think of how many employees an Adobe or Apple has, then realize the very-complex Coda 2 was basically engineered by four people at its peak. Smartest guys in the industry, I tell you.

Diet Coda’s origins start with Dave, and Prompt. (True story: Prompt was only intended to be the terminal in Diet Coda, and a testbed for our very complex text view. Only later did we make it its own app.) Then Garrett joined the team, jumped in head-first and, from file browsers to syntax highlighters, brought it all together with Dave. These two are amazing.

There’s more: Kenichi faced very tough icon challenges and created gorgeous things. Neven helped me with a nearly-infinite list of design to-do’s and took charge of Diet’s form and function. James is our sort-of modern day Mario, climbing the towering girders of bugs, automated builds, and submissions while jumping a seemingly infinite number of bizarre barrels being thrown at us by a grinning Apple. Les, Tim, and Mike held down the never-ending support channel, a thankless but critical task (and Tim helped build some amazing web pages), while Noby hit the road to really bring our products to prominence in Japan. All the while, Greg was building other cool things you’ll see soon.

We are very lucky, because there’s so much criss-crossing in here: it’s a true group effort. From the OpenGL magic of our SuperLoupe, to the understated power of our new path bar, to the WebKit craziness of our Coda 2 video tour, to our unique sidebar and dock thought up in the office shower, everyone here really excels at taking “what if” to “wow”. The products (and users) really win.

Coda 2 also had some outside help: our old friends at TheCodingMonkeys were responsible for lots of new core editor features. Brandon Sneed wrapped up Git support after Ian went to become a fancy doctor. Local web hero Thomas Reynolds built the cool Coda Pops — they’re actually HTML, you know. Rowan Beentje, and the entire Sequel Pro team, went beyond the call of duty to help us integrate and adapt their great work — even to the point of hunting down every past contributor to agree to a license change from GPL to BSD. Amazing.

Then, there’s our almost 200 beta testers, who, throughout the nearly five month long beta cycle, helped us fix and close an astonishing 546+ bugs. Each one of them made our apps better.

Finally, special thanks to you!!

And I mean this: you. You who are giddy with excitement on Twitter. You who tell your friends about our work. You who purchase our software and keep our company alive. You who, like us, find good software inspiring and life-enhancing. You are the fuel for our engine.

Thanks.

Love,
Cabel.

I made a promise in a status meeting long ago: when we finished Coda 2 and Diet Coda we’d all go on a trip.

So, we (very) carefully timed it so that when our apps were In Review, Panic would be In Hawaii.

Coordinating the travel felt like putting together a shuttle launch. (We cashed in over 900,000 frequent flier miles that we’d been squirreling away through our Alaska Airlines Visa since Panic was born!) Ultimately, it was super rewarding for Steve and me to have everyone’s families in one place, together. We turned the Beach Cottages at Turtle Bay into our own weird, cool little commune, walking up and down the lawn and greeting our familiar, but now tropical, neighbors. And these guys took the trip and ran with it — so much swimming, hiking, surfing lessons, great food, unimaginably beautiful beach drives, and the most relaxing hammock time in the world.

Now, the Apple surprises that popped up while we were In Review made it a little less than 100% relaxing for me, but I’ll tell you this: if you have to be making last-minute changes — such as removing the “iCloud” logo from our first launch screen? — there’s no better place to submit new builds than right here:

It felt like one of those moments in life we’ll always look back to with warm fondness.

Those are important.

It took longer than it should have. There’s no getting around it. This is the struggle we face constantly. First, we’re busy working on other things, but nobody knows that. Then, we start off thinking we’ll do something simple, and write “No major rewrite!” on the whiteboard. 6 months later, we find ourselves in the middle of this huge, awesome, Christmas-like update that will rock socks, but which comes at a price: a longer period of development so users get really antsy, more strain on engineers who already work so hard, a whole lot more bugs and testing, everything. It even took a toll on me: for the first time in nearly 15 years these two apps had me waking up every morning basically sick to my stomach with nerves. The huge scope, the uncertainty and difficulty of trying to coordinate with Apple and the App Stores, the fact that we are doing two major releases at once which we’ve never done before… well, it’s been a challenge.

But oh, what a challenge.

Looking at it today I think I can finally start to feel that it was worth it. It’s not everyday you get to launch what we just launched. I’m super excited and proud of what we put together.

Yet, at the same time, it might not ever happen again… maybe, from here on out, we do smaller, more gradual releases over time, like a normal, sane company would.

But I digress.

Coda 2 and Diet Coda are now available for sale.

And we really, really think you’ll really like them.

Of course, these are major new releases, so There Will Be Bugs. Just let us know what you find. We’re on the case and we’re working constantly.

And enjoy. Please enjoy!

NOTE: DO NOT post Support issues as comments on this blog post. It’s hard to support people via comments. E-mail us or Tweet us. Thanks!