Coda is a commercial and proprietary

web development Web development is the work involved in developing a website for the Internet (World Wide Web) or an intranet (a private network). Web development can range from developing a simple single static page of plain text to complex web application ...

application for

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

, developed by

Panic Panic is a sudden sensation of fear, which is so strong as to dominate or prevent reason and logical thinking, replacing it with overwhelming feelings of anxiety and frantic agitation consistent with an animalistic fight-or-flight reac ...

. It was first released on April 23, 2007 and won the 2007 Apple Design Award for Best User Experience. Coda version 2.0 was released on 24 May 2012, along with an

iPad The iPad is a brand of iOS and iPadOS-based tablet computers that are developed by Apple Inc. The iPad was conceived before the related iPhone but the iPhone was developed and released first. Speculation about the development, operati ...

version called Diet Coda. Although formerly available on the

Mac App Store The App Store (also known as the Mac App Store) is a digital distribution platform for macOS apps, often referred to as Mac apps, created and maintained by Apple Inc. The platform was announced on October 20, 2010, at Apple's "Back to the Mac" ...

, it was announced on May 14, 2014 that the update to Coda 2.5 would not be available in the Mac App Store due to sandboxing restrictions. Coda was discontinued in 2020 and replaced by Nova.

Concept and idea

The concept for Coda came from the web team at Panic, who would have five or six different programs for coding, testing and reference. The lack of full-featured website development platforms equivalent to application development platform

Xcode Xcode is Apple's integrated development environment (IDE) for macOS, used to develop software for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS. It was initially released in late 2003; the latest stable release is version 14.2, released on December 13, ...

served as the purpose for Coda's creation.

Development

Currently, little is known about the actual development of Coda. What is known from Panic co-founder Steven Frank's blog is that Coda development started at Panic sometime in late 2005. Assigned to the project were 5 engineers, 3 people on support and testing, one designer, and one Japanese

localizer An instrument landing system localizer, or simply localizer (LOC), is a system of horizontal guidance in the instrument landing system, which is used to guide aircraft along the axis of the runway. Principle of operation In aviation, a localiz ...

Sections

The application is divided into six sections (Sites, Edit, Preview, CSS, Terminal, and Books), which are accessed through six tabs at the top of the application. Users can also split the window into multiple sections either vertically or horizontally, to access multiple sections or different files at the same time.

Sites

In Coda, sites are the equivalent of "projects" in many other applications like

TextMate TextMate is a general-purpose GUI text editor for macOS created by Allan Odgaard. TextMate features declarative customizations, tabs for open documents, recordable macros, folding sections, snippets, shell integration, and an extensible bun ...

. Each site has its own set of files, its own FTP settings, etc. When Coda is closed in the midst of a project and then reopened, the user is presented with exactly what it was like before the application was closed. Another notable feature is the ability to add a Local and Remote version to each site, allowing the user to synchronize the file(s) created, modified or deleted from their local and remote locations.

Files

Coda incorporates a slimmed down version of the company's popular FTP client,

Transmit Transmit is a file transfer client program for macOS. Developed by Panic, Transmit is shareware. After a seven-day trial period, the product can only be used for seven-minute sessions until it has been purchased. Originally built as an FTP clien ...

, dubbed "Transmit Turbo". The Files portion is a regular

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...

, SFTP, FTP+SSL, and

WebDAV WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents ''directly'' in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for concu ...

client, where the user can edit, delete, create, and rename files and folders.

Plug-ins

Coda 1.6 and later supports plug-ins, which are scripts usually written in command line programming languages like

Cocoa Cocoa may refer to: Chocolate * Chocolate * ''Theobroma cacao'', the cocoa tree * Cocoa bean, seed of ''Theobroma cacao'' * Chocolate liquor, or cocoa liquor, pure, liquid chocolate extracted from the cocoa bean, including both cocoa butter and ...

AppleScript AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. that facilitates automated control over scriptable Mac applications. First introduced in System 7, it is currently included in all versions of macOS as part of a package of system aut ...

Perl Perl is a family of two High-level programming language, high-level, General-purpose programming language, general-purpose, Interpreter (computing), interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it ...

, or even shell scripting languages like bash, that appear in Coda's menu bar and do specific tasks like appending URLs or inserting text at a certain point. Plug-ins can either be written using

or through Panic's free program, the Coda Plug-in Creator.

Command-line utility

Coda does not come with its own command-line utility. Instead, a third-party utility such as coda-cli can be used.

Reviews

Coda 1

Coda 1 received a review of 3.5/5 mice from

Macworld ''Macworld'' is a website dedicated to products and software of Apple Inc., published by Foundry, a subsidiary of IDG Inc. It started life as a print magazine in 1984 and had the largest audited circulation (both total and newsstand) of Macin ...

. It received 4/5 stars from CNET's Download.com.

Coda 2

Coda 2 received a rating of 4.5/5 mice from Macworld.

References

External links

Panic - Coda
{{HTML editors HTML editors FTP clients SSH File Transfer Protocol clients Shareware Panic software MacOS programming tools MacOS text editors 2007 software