Quantra is a very nice editor... it has its own micro-FTP client kind of like Dreamweaver's... and it colours in all kinds of code...

If I'm on Windows I use EditPlus2... simple and effective.

Yeah it can be very useful when you are hand coding and especially when you are about tyoe a hex value it pops up the color pallet which is very useful.

hmm, as long as you don't start thinking the bad things Dreamweaver (and other wysywyg tools) do are actually good...

While it has improved and is often better than the competition, that says more about the sorry state of the competition and previous versions of Dreamweaver than about the product itself.

None such tools are good for more than rapid prototyping of sites, to get an idea of what the layout will look like, before the real coding effort starts using proper tools like VI.

Is that a joke? There's certainly nothing to gain in using an outdated tool over a modern one...
VI annoys the flip out of me.

All I look for in an "editor" is a directory listing on the side, the ability to open more than one file at a time, a built in FTP/CVS client, and maybe autocoloring/autoindent of code.

Dreamweaver has these things, so Dreamweaver is good as a glorified Notepad with extras.

Whatever Dreamweaver does 'automatically'; it doesn't do it because you want or need it to, it does it because someone decided to put that feature in Dreamweaver, and so anything Dreamweaver can 'provide' you, has been 'provided' to the thousands+ of people who also use Dreamweaver.

If you want something even half original, use "Code View" all the time, and unless you want a tonne of extra work, don't even go into "Design View" :- it doesn't give a good representation of how a page will actually look in a browser.

no, that's no joke.
VI is by far the most productive editor out there once you get to know it for many purposes.

I agree with this but I don't use dreamweaver's FTP I just like a good simple one like Filezilla.

About the whole design view not giving you an accurate representation, this is totally true and drives me insane because sometimes it would be nice to view the page there.

Well. the resultant productivity of an editor has got to be a combination of its ease of use and its functionality... and unless I'm in the dark here, I know of no features in VI that make it any more than a text editor - please correct me if it does have mystical hidden features.
But even if it does; it is certainly not easy or friendly to use. I used it for a very short time and only to edit configuration files... then I pressed some key combination and it opens everything in write-lock mode =P
I'd rather use MSDOS edit, it's got a nice old-school color scheme and drop down menus ^_-

Dreamweaver's FTP aint so nice... but it's certainly handy if you're doing something big, and your local directory structure exactly matches the one you want on your webserver. If I don't intend to use the FTP in Dreamweaver, I don't use Dreamweaver =P

I think, coloring in code keywords/tags is the biggest must. I can't easily interpret any language if it's all shown in black and white.

Everything you do in Dreamweaver though, has to be done by 'hand'. Until computer's know what we want them to do from our brainwave patterns and do it for us; it's gonna be that way. Even dragging and dropping is a creative process, and picking a pre-made template involves a few mouse clicks...

I guess the debate is along the lines of "is it better to use macro tools when editing or better to leave them well alone and use little keypresses instead".

Well, Matt say: "little chisel good for attractive patternwork, big chainsaw good at leveling trees".

So, not to carry that analogy too far.. once you've made a woodpile, put the chainsaw down and get your chisel out; and if a great forest lies before you, the chainsaw is gonna save a lot of effort in the long run.

You'll find, the more affinity/love/whatever you'd call it that you have a for a given project, the more effort you'll put into it making it unique and of-yourself. If you're working for a load of clients who all want roughly the same thing; I wouldn't say it's wrong to use Dreamweaver templates, pre-made or customized. But, in the long run, they probably wouldn't save you much time or effort.

VI takes practice, like any complex piece of equipment, to master.
I'm not surprised you couldn't get to grips with it in a few minutes. It may look like notepad but looks are deceptive.

What about crimson editor. It is really good for hand coding, you can open multiple files and it colors them correctly. What are people thoughts?

Well crimpson editor is quite good as freeware, but I think there are several other good options too when you seek for a freeware editor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_text_editors