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Over the last few years I have tried many text editors such as Dreamweaver, Text Mate and Net Beans – all have their pro and cons. Personally I found Aptana Studio one of the best editors out there and to top it off – It’s FREE. It is brilliant for both front end and backend developers as it has a full understanding of JavaScript and PHP and provides great coding assistance. In this post I will show you how to get set up with Aptana.

Getting Started

To set up a project, go to File->New->Web Project. This will bring up the window below. You can specify a project name and a local project location. By default Aptana sets up a project location. You can change this by simply un ticking the tick box and browsing to a location.

If you wish to set up a PHP project, go to File->New->Project and choose PHP Project. Once you have set this up click finish.

You should now notice your project in the project explorer on the left hand side.

Setting Up FTP

Unlike most other FREE text editors – Aptana Studio 3 offers full FTP support with remote view. To set up an new FTP connection for a new project right click on the connections tab in the project view and select connection manager. Here you can create a new new connection by choosing the local project and entering the destination details.

To upload a file, you can click the upload arrow in the project explorer, alternatively you can press CMD, SHIFT & U on a mac or CTRL, SHIFT & U on a PC.

Setting up the Appearance

The one cool thing about Aptana is that you can totally customise the appearance. There also loads of preset themes like Eclipse, Dreamweaver, iMac Classic and older versions of Aptana. To bring up the below window go to Aptana Studio 3->Preferences->Aptana Studio->Themes.

Another great feature of Aptana is the code formatting. You can customise how the editor formats HTML, CSS and PHP etc. For example, you can tell Aptana to put all p tags on there own line.

All this is just scratching the surface of Aptana Studio 3 – there is so much more such a debugging, plugins, project templates and other web design / development features. Please feel free to share and tips and tricks.