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 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.
Sections
The application is divided into six sections, 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. 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 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, dubbed "Transmit Turbo". The Files portion is a regular FTP, SFTP, FTP+SSL, and WebDAV client, where the user can edit, delete, create, and rename files and folders.
Editor
The editor in Coda incorporates a licensed version of the SubEthaEdit engine, rather than having a custom one, to allow for sharing of documents over the Bonjour network. Coda also has a new Find/Replace mechanism, which allows users to do complex replaces using a method similar to regular expressions. Coda also recognises specially-formatted comment tags in many syntaxes, called bookmarks, which appear in a separate pane beside the editor called the Code Navigator. Bookmarks allow the user to jump to the corresponding line of text from anywhere in the editor by clicking on the link in the Code Navigator.
Plug-ins
Coda 1.6 and later supports plug-ins, which are scripts usually written in command lineprogramming languages like Cocoa, AppleScript, Perl, 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 Xcode 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. It received 4/5 stars from CNET's Download.com.
Coda 2
Coda 2 received a rating of 4.5/5 mice from Macworld.
