Mac HTML editor product reviews

By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: June 4, 2016

Mac HTML editor review: I didn't go exactly where I wanted with that last post about Mac WYSIWYG HTML editors, so let me try again. This time I'll go the product review route I initially planned to go in that last post.

Mac HTML editors

First, as I related in that post I'm not happy with any of the Mac HTML editors I've found. Second, the point I didn't make, is that these are the Mac HTML editors I've looked at so far:

I'll try to keep these Mac HTML editor product reviews short and to the point. Also, keep in mind that I am looking for a WYSIWYG Mac HTML editor, so all my comments come from that perspective.

I tried both Pages and iWeb from Apple, and iWeb in particular can be good for (a) people who want to create good-looking static websites that (b) aren't worried about what the generated HTML code looks like behind the scenes. In fact, I've used it for several static websites, and as I say, as long as you don't care about what the code looks like behind the scenes, it has some great-looking templates. That being said, I would never use it for developing web applications.

As non-WYSIWYG HTML editors for the Mac go, Coda seems okay. It looks good, but I used it less than 10 times before deciding that it wasn't what I wanted. Same thing for Taco HTML. For me these are HTML-jockey tools, and that's not what I want right now.

As I recall Nvu had the WYSIWYG interface, but I didn't like the HTML it generated. It took a lot of editing to get the HTML code looking the way I wanted it. Also, Nvu hasn't been updated since 2005.

TextMate is an interesting text editor, and I use it more than any other editor, but it's not a WYSIWYG editor. (I think it has a lot of power, but frankly I need to read the manual to figure out how to get it to work the way I do. The syntax-highlighting is nice, but for some reason creating an <li> tag doesn't create a corresponding </li> tag. Also, I don't like the auto-indentation and quoting features, but again, I'm sure they can all be modified if I RTFM.)

Today I looked at Google's Page Creator application, part of the Google Apps suite. It might be okay, but it's still not what I want. I think they have some WYSIWYG features, but I don't want to start with a template, and I didn't see how you'd create an HTML table very easily. Other than that it may be the best option going.

FWIW, here's a list of Mac HTML editors I haven't looked at yet:

~~I'm downloading Freeway as I write this.~~ Freeway didn't work out either. Way too many features, including having to draw an HTML rectangle (which it then remembered the size of) in order to be able to add text. Again, great for a lot of people, just not what I'm interested in.