Just wasted too much time reading Daring Fireball on Coda:

The danger creating an ambitious IDE like this is kitchen-sink-itis. One problem with application bloat is that it has a gravity-like pull. Once you start edging closer to bloat, the pull gets stronger. Like an undertow, itโ€™s easy to think youโ€™re playing it safe โ€“ Us? Bloatware? Never! โ€“ when in fact youโ€™re already being pulled out to sea.

If nothing else, Panic has clearly succeeded with Coda in two ways: (a) the app looks marvelous; and (b) it does many things but is almost devoid of bloat. (a) is the one most people will rave about, but (b) was the more difficult accomplishment.

A good point in theory. Nobody uses Seamonkey. Everyone uses Firefox and NVu. No serious web developer used Visual InterDev. They used, well, Ultra-Edit and mapped drives.

The real measuring stick here is, of course, does the app save you time without sacrificing quality? If you will use it every freakin' day for three years, a steep learning curve is acceptable. Exhibit A: Several years back, I finally stopped using pico, BBEdit Lite, and Ultra-Edit and now use VIm on every computer I own. I still feel like a VIm n00b (I only started using "b" regularly a few weeks ago, years in), but I've saved craploads of time. It's that good at text editing. Nobody will ever beat it, only match it generally in a different way, you freakin' emacs fanatics.

If I had craploads of monitor real estate, would it be nice to ensure that none of my windows overlapped when I was editing html, a la Ratpoison? You'd better believe it. I'm good, no, I'm ninja-freakin' AWESOME at the alt-tab, but I'd rather have five text files open in VIm plus SQuirreL-SQL, Safari, Firefox, FileZilla/Transmit, and, heck, long as we're dreaming, IE on Win2k on the screen at the same time without losing sight of any of those windows.

So how could Coda help? Well, if it'll provide me with a web-editing-specific ratpoison like interface stitching together the apps of my choice (of which Transmit is one), I'm game. That would save time.

But before I could save all that time, I'd need another $1800 first.