I need to rant.  Dreamweaver has the most frustrating, nearly non-functional implementation of FTP ever.  You would think that a product that has been around for over a decade would excel at the basic neccessities of web design.  Chief among these is the ability to manage the workflow for a designer wishing to edit files directly on a production server with FTP.

Dreamweaver allows this, but does so in a way that will probably ruin your life.

For instance, opening a file on an FTP server causes Dreamweaver to download a local version of the file, allow you to edit it, and then publish the changes upon save.  This is really great until you accidentally press “Put” and all of those local file you forgot existed are uploaded to overwrite all of those new versions you laboriously tweaked from another computer.

But of course you will only get to experience this malady if you are actually able to keep a connection to your FTP server, which Dreamweaver is unable to do.  I swear half of my development time is spent staring at a “Waiting for server” dialog.  Dreamweaver is completely unable to revive a connection that is stale.  You have to close it and reopen it, pray, cuss, and kick a small child to get it to work.

Do Adobe developers even use this piece of crap?

When it comes to syntax highlighting and things of that nature, Dreamweaver seems to keep up with most other editors, but who cares…I mean simple pieces of software like TextPad easily keep up with these features at a much more reasonable cost.

So thank you Dreamweaver for ruining my life.  I hope to return the favor someday.

In the meantime, can someone suggest a resonable alternative that won’t ruin my life?