WYSIWYG website editor for Mac or at least HTML formatting editor for Mac

Hackerspace Computer Science
#1

I have my own legacy website, mikegigi.com, built over the years with some pretty basic techniques and tools. Since moving a Mac (and some health issues) I have not been able to keep it up as I have not found even a program to load HTM files and put them back on my drive. I have done some vital work by changing the name, editing as text, saving, changing the name back. At a minimum I could work if I drop the file back on my HD and refresh the browser without the name changing, etc.
Everybody seems to be using “Build on our site with our editor, we make it easy!” Nope, not moving 500 images and dozens of HTML files.
So?

  1. Editor to load HTML directly, edit as text and put back as browser viewable, OR
  2. Editor that formats HTML statements with indenting and format flags plus step 1, OR
  3. Edit in What You See Is What You Get and also allows dropping into source code and step 1.

I have an FTP program that is similar to CuteFTP that I was using under Windows.

#2

We have Adobe Suite licenses so you would be able to use Dreamweaver at DMS. If you want something local you can use BBEdit, Brackets or Notepad ++. Even Google has a Dreamweaver like clone called Google Web Designer https://webdesigner.withgoogle.com/

3 Likes
#3

You might consider rebuilding your site as a WordPress site. That would decouple the look of the site (the theme) from the site’s content, allowing you to focus on the latter.

I know you have several hundred pages. I moved a legacy site from static HTML to WordPress in about three hours. Once the empty WP site is set up, work on one page at a time. Create an empty WP page for the content, then open the HTML spiece for the original page. You can often just copy and paste the main page content into the new WP page and save.

Setting up a map of old URLs to new in an excel spreadsheet would allow you to keep up with the old and new names.

You can use a spidering tool to pull a list of pages off the current site using Scream Frog SEO Spider or another tool. I can help you with this if you’re interested.

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#4

Thanks for your offer, but I am pretty certain I don’t want to go that way. There are less than a dozen files that actually need added facts, updated information and corrections so creating a new site in full would be an incredible misuse of my limited energy.

#5

I work on custom marketing sites professionally, am an advocate for static sites, and use a Mac. If you just want a simple process that makes it easier to edit your site, you might consider the following:

  1. Download the entire site and work on a local copy (this makes development much easier, lets you try things without affecting visitors, allows find-and-replace on over the entire site, and gives you a backup).
  2. Use a text editor (like Brackets) that can conveniently show you a live preview in a web browser of changes as you type them—instantly and out-of-the-box.
  3. Sync the local copy with your web server whenever you’re ready to publish a batch of changes. There should be a way to send just files that have been updated, and there should be a way to set this up to be done in a few clicks or a single command in the terminal.

There are all kinds of neat tools I could recommend for managing static sites, but based on what you said, it sounds like the above approach is the simplest that will do everything you need.

#6

Thanks for your reply.
I have always done step 1, have a Mac solution for step 3, and will consider Brackets even though it isn’t on the App Store.

#7

Excellent! I wasn’t sure based on what you said. I would definitely not restrict your search to options on the MAS, as most of the good solutions are not available there. You might also try out Coda if you’re looking for an out-of-the-box, integrated solution with a GUI, though I haven’t used it much myself.

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#8

This might be an unpopular option, but I’ve always used Visual Studio Code for this exact type of work. There are a ton of plugins that add the functionality you are looking for, but it takes a little bit of configuring to get set up.

VSCode does have a Mac version as well, even though it’s made by Microsoft. Hooray, open source software!

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#9

Best editor on Mac is Vim. Terminal.app > vim. Second best Editor is https://macromates.com/ which has plugins for cuteftp and all the pluses any one would want.

Best WYSIWYG website editor for Mac. Squarespace.com. Sorry not going to get a decent wysiwyg html editor anywheres (ever). Not even iWeb is worth it and that’s the exact tool your asking for, ftp uploads, Wysiwyg editing, supports modern html/js, etc…

But go with iWeb if one’s not wanting to learn html/css/js or bother with the low level stuff of that. or Wix/Squarespaces if one just wants to get things done.

#10

Also, don’t ftp anymore. no one supports really these days. Its deader than uucp/usenet.

Use git (revison control software with tarball archiving and ssh/sftp/https support). One can then use that to deploy remotely while editing locally. Making your local copy the source of truth.

#11

Haaa! manage a bloated WordPress install via git! Or worse several with 8,000+ files. But even then that is only the files. But the problem here is WordPress not git!

Laravel Forge has super nice git integration for push to deploy on Digital Ocean, AWS or Linode.

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#12

That has to be a pain. WPMU should make that easier and for that many files one should use a cdn like s3. Love WP offload media plugin for that. Though s3fuse is best if one can use fuse and update the fstab.