Is Dreamweaver really the best?

Or is there a better program out there I'm missing out on?

Depending on what you do, what's your budget and which kind of style you prefer to work, yes and no.

DW is good but as with any other editor, you need to know what you are doing if you use it in any other than code view.

There are plenty of excellent editors specializing to specific scripting language such as PhP, ASP, Python etc which you'll most probably find more productive than DW if you are using any specific language.

Longer you work and better you become in your chosen language, you often realise that more 'features' an editor has, more restrictive it becomes and easily end-up using text editor, such as Vim for your work because they allow you to concentrate to the most important: code.

If your work is design oriented, then that's another story alltogether...

I use design AND code view. I mostly just design complicated layouts and tables with design view because it's faster. But other than that I use code view because I do a lot of PHP. I love it because of the syntax highlighting and the fact it has not yet pissed me off. lmao

Lol okay silly. Better I define as give me personal opinions on what gets the job done best.

I use dreamweaver for the basic crap because I'm lazy I usually edit most of the code myself when things get tricky...that way I have 100% control. DW is the way to go in my opinion..

Yah I'm pretty happy with it myself. It makes tedious things quicker. Time is something important with me because I'm always taking on so much work at once. But I know from life experience that what I THINK is best, (e.g. for years I thought windows was 10000 times better than any other operating system, something most techs would disagree with!) isn't necessarily what is.

I use Eclipse because 1. it's free and 2. you can plug in basically ANY language/process you want. If you want to use it as a PHP editor with syntax highlighting, you can. If you want to use it as a database design/ERD or UML design tool, you can. Or you can do Extreme Programming/Test-Driven Development with Junit built in... And millions of other things.

I use it primarily for test-driven development, PHP, Java, JavaScript, and CSS development. They have a great plugin called Web Standard Tools that helps you write standards-compliant CSS, HTML, XML, XSLT, SOAP, etc.).

AFAIK, it does not support WYSIWYG for HTML; however, it does support graphical Java Swing/AWT editing. It has a Graphical Editing Framework that plugin developers can use to create their own graphical editing plugins, so if someone wants to create an HTML WYSIWYG editor, they are free to do so. I just don't know if there is (a good) one out yet.

I use gedit, but hey, DreamWeaver's good. At least it's not FrontPage.

I use Dreamweaver..great at pulling layouts quickly together. I use to use it a lot when I first started doing php stuff .. connecting to databases via the recordsets etc... but as I became more proficient I found that I just dive into the code more and more see the code view now..

Yes, but they are table-based and incorrect layouts. Unless, of course, the newer versions of DW make CSS layouts and I just don't know about it.

As far as I remember, DW has had layer support since version 1 (can't be bothered to dig out the disc, install and check it now). As a matter of fact, Macromedia has always been great promoter of CSS based layouts and you have always been able to do it in 3 ways in Dreamweaver (visual mode):

1- Use one of provided templates.
2- Convert tables to layers.
3- Design using layers only.

DW (I think it was version 4) was, for example, first editor to support dynamic layers and timelines (== 'animated' layers).

Funny as it may sound, I always had DW (up to MX2004), rarely used it and when I did, always in code view. Since I dumped Windows completely few years back, installation discs have been gathering dust on my shelf.

Depends on what you want, and how you work...
I use just any software with word highlighting, and if it has intellisence, even better...
I usally break all the page int peaces, so there is not much use for dreamweaver for me, since i type all the characters in the application's code.