1) Speed. Espresso colorizes things faster and generally moves a lot quicker than Coda for me. It is not uncommon for me to launch a larger file in Coda and have to sit and wait for the coloring to catch up.

2) Tab stops. Coda’s snippets are worthless. Not only can you not see what the shortcuts are without editing the snippet (terrible UI choice), but they have no tab stops. Espresso did the right thing by copying Textmate here; being able to jump between common editable areas in a snippet using tab is really important to me. This is why I’ve poured far more effort into TEA for Espresso than Coda; Coda’s solution will never be as integrated with the editor as it should be until/unless they implement mirrored tab stops.

3) Ease of styling. This has less to do with actual editing of text, but it plays its part. In Coda, if I realize that the color of my CSS properties is actually making it more difficult for me to edit text, I have to change the values in at least four different places. In Espresso, I whip open a CSS file, make and preview changes in real time, and I’m done.

I find that editing in Espresso is very close to editing in Textmate (which is definitely what I want) but with more polish to the UI and some key features like a usable undo. More importantly, Espresso is under active development while Textmate 2 is vaporware, and although not feature complete the developer’s focus on Sugars and getting UI just right make me extremely hopeful for future versions.

Coda has a workflow unmatched by Textmate or Espresso, but extensibility and a fantastic editing experience are not its primary focus.

All that said, your mileage will vary. If you don’t find yourself butting up against Coda’s editing limitations, or find specific features that Coda has which Espresso lacks then by all means use Coda (for me it’s project-wide find and replace; I don’t use block editing all that often). Like Coda before it, Espresso 1.0 is not as appealing as I think Espresso 1.5 or so will be, so you can always revisit your decision down the road (and I’m here to say it is possible to get the best of both worlds; I have been known to manage a project in Coda and use right click->”Edit in Espresso” for actual coding).

Good luck! Choosing a text editor is always tough.

Yours isn’t the first review that I’ve seen suggesting that Espresso’s text editor is better than Coda’s, but other than code folding, just what is it that Espresso’s doing that I should be missing in Coda’s editor? Coda has tab snippets — perhaps not as sophisticated as Espresso’s or TextMate’s, but even so, they’re present. Coda is pretty easy to write plug-ins for. And when it comes to the actual mundane task of chewing on text, Coda does auto-insertion of closing tags and brackets/parentheses, balancing between them, “block editing” in a similar fashion to TextMate’s. If these are in Espresso, I haven’t seen ‘em yet. If there’s a freakin’ way to just *show invisible characters* in Espresso, I haven’t seen it yet. The stuff I miss from TextMate when I’m working in Coda — most notably the context-sensitive indenting — doesn’t show up in Espresso, whereas some of the stuff I miss from BBEdit that’s not in TextMate — most notably pane-splitting — isn’t there in Espresso. (Both of them at least handle undo better than TextMate’s “one character at a time” weirdness.)

So is it too early to expect some of this stuff? Am I looking for magical ponies? Both Espresso and Coda are visually beautiful apps, something that doesn’t get said about editors too often, but Coda seems to be more than just a pretty face, as it were.

Not familiar with TEA, but looking into it now.

Thanks for the article.

Not to mention it has the nicest interface of any text editor I’ve ever used.

Congrats on getting TEA into Espresso! Sugars like that will be the ones that bridge the gap between Espresso and Textmate and make the transition easier for developers.