ToolsJam

Why waste money on commercial software that will soon become obsolete when there are some excellent open source tools? I recommend Kompozer (a nice HTML editor), and WinSCP (an FTP client)

I build sites on the side, and there’s definatly a few that I couldn’t work without:MAMPTextMateFirefox + Firebug (most important for web dev ever!)BrowsershotsPhotoshopCyberduck (Transmit is awesome, but not freeware, and the extra features just aren’t that cool)I really recommend everyone get Firebug!

Not being the WYSIWYG sort, I currently do most of my work in jEdit, which is also what I use in the classroom for all programming instruction. It is open source, has a huge plugin library for pretty much every programming language ever thought of (even oddball things like Linden Scripting Language for Second Life), and, as a Java app, is entire cross platform. A regExp aware search/replace tool that can search both buffers and full directory trees is indispensible for those big projects.

I am glad someone put PhotoShop in there. I do a lot of design for print (fliers and other stuff that I print at home but that looks great). Photoshop plus InDesign are key tools for this. I also use InDeisgn to make beautiful lecture slides (circumventing PowerPoint).

@christian_d – notepad++ is definitely a good option. When I still used Windows, I regularly used it. Fast, full featured, open source, and free. All good in my book.

@mhick255 – Espresso is a good app. I’ve recommended it to many. If I wasn’t using Coda, I’d probably be using it.

A few years ago I picked up a copy of Zend Studio (ZDE 5.2) at an academic price of $99. Not sure if they still offer that sort of deal, but its been a great tool. Especially when it comes to automagically finishing tags/quotes, highlighting syntax errors before hand, etc. Its great for PHP (of course!) but also HTML editing and so forth. I like BBEdit for HTML-ing as well. I see lots of kudos for Coda so I’ll give that a look-see sometime.

@proftucker – BBEdit is a great code editor, and well worth people’s time to check out if they are looking for something a little more streamlined than something like Coda