It’s been so long since I’d used HyperEdit…so of course I’ve been using a bunch of code editing apps since then. However the 2 things I liked most about HyperEdit was 1) Live Preview and 2) PHP support. During my time with the other apps, I’d come to really admire Brackets since it had “built in” Live Preview and Inline Editors (codepeek).
So… it’s difficult for me to look at Whisk’s (current) features without drawing comparisons to other editors like Brackets, VS Code, Atom etc. that are all pretty feature rich at this point. I posted about the need for a roadmap that might help my expectations with Whisk.
Besides live PHP rendering, what would be the current (and future) standout features for Whisk?
We don’t comment on future releases, but I can say the three items (aside from the UI refresh) that got the biggest overhaul in Whisk 2.0 are:
Watched Files - compared to HyperEdit’s “Linked Files,” this tries to automatically determine which files to watch to reload the web view. It will also take the in-memory contents from open Hype documents for the preview so they don’t need to be saved. Editing a CSS file linked to a HTML document is a much better flow often requiring no setup work now. I wrote a bit more about the feature in this post.
Improved Browser Preview - not only can you preview quickly to any browsers installed on your machine, you an also send the document to Hype Reflect for previewing on iPhone/iPad.
Document Setting Preservation - HyperEdit relied heavily on global preferences, but Whisk will remember per-document settings. You can also save the entire setup via the View > Save/Apply/Restore Window Layout and Settings pane.
Some of these are common among other editors, but I think Whisk does a relatively good job and definitely surpasses HyperEdit with them. Whisk is still definitely “lightweight” in the editor department, but the goal with v2 is to modernize and make forward progress.
