I thought this would be an interesting discussion to have. Although most of us are hand-coders, we still use several tools to aid us in making HTML, CSS documents, etc.

Personally, I love the combination of Firebug/Web Developer/Dreamweaver (and Photoshop, but this is a coding forum). The first two, for those of you who are brand new, are Firefox extensions, and they make my life so much easier that I cannot imagine life without them now.
Especially useful is Firebug, which allows us to do live testing of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, to adjust margins, for example, in real time, and watch the element move across the screen until it is positioned perfectly, then enter the result into the HTML editor. Because of how useful this is, I spend more time in Firebug than I do in Dreamweaver, which I only use as a text editor anyway.

Also useful is the Web Developer Toolbar, which as a ton of great keyboard shortcuts to view the source, disable Javascript, disable CSS, view the CSS (sometimes this is preferrable to Firebug because of the ability to find things on the page). It has many, many other features, most of which I never use.

Dreamweaver is, of course, the industry standard, and I use it because its code highlighting is so excellent, and I know its keyboard shortcuts well. It is also excellent for project organization, has top-level features for interacting with an FTP server, and is extensionable.

Besides Photoshop, those are my big three (I'm more of a coder anyway). What tools do you all use?

those are all great suggestions. i use topstyle for coding. i love it!

i use dreamweaver, web developer, photoshop. planning to give CSS Sculptor a try.

I use the same extensions, can't live w/o Firebug and Web Developer. I do all my coding in TopStyle, but I do have and do still use Dreamweaver for some things. It's great for site management. I also have a free screen reader installed, an accessibility check extension, a LYNX viewer extension, FANGS extension, and a link evaluator. Oh yeah.. and IE View extension (NOT the tab version).

I use Photoshop almost exclusively for my graphics.

For me it, Eclipse, VIM, sed/awk + Firebug/Firefox
I don't do much with graphics but, when I do, I use the ImageMagick libs and do them in bulk.

Oh yea, forgot to mention, for deep debugging, Ethereal can't be beat.

Notepad. =D

nice tools you got there ... i use it too for my web projects plus adobe flash for some animation

Adobe Flash, SiteBuilder2.0 (cheap and basic, it aint Dreamweaver) , wordpad as chief text editor, and i'm jut now loking at this new thing I got called PHPdesigner 2008 to see if I can learn anything from it as I am still Very New to PHPspeak myself.

I'm in love with adobe.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
Adobe Photoshop CS3
Adobe Fireworks CS3
Adobe Flash CS3
Adobe Reader (viewing pdf files)
Adobe Illustrator CS3

etc.

For coding, I use a Mac program called Coda. It's roughly equivalent to Notepad++ on Windows but it comes with a built in preview function amongst other things. I would hate to code without that now

For graphics, I use GIMP mostly as well as a Mac program called Pixelmator.

I really can't stand using Dreamweaver and Fireworks gets on my nerves too - Abode just isn't my favourite company

Dan

lol, so your the opposite of me with views on adobe. haha

I will definitely check out Firebug and web developer for Firefox, thanks for the suggestions.

I use Dreamweaver primarily for coding and management. I also use Photoshop, Fireworks, Flash, getting into illustrator still for aesthetics.

Originally Posted by nyef

Notepad. =D

woohoo! I'm not the only one. Actually, I use Notepad2 (http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html) as it adds colors to your code to make my life a lot easier.

Though when I need in-browser help and troubleshooting (especially with CSS/PHP), I'm all about Web Developer and then Firebug. I'm not a huge fan of Firebug because it creates an incredible memory leak, so I only activate it when necessary.