Call Me Goon

This tip is only for MobileMe users, sorry!  If you aren't a MobileMe user, I don't want you to waste your time, no need reading any further.

I've been using Coda for awhile now and I think its my favorite editor.  The only major drawback has been that I can't sync my settings across multiple computers.  I am a "sync" nerd utilizing Dropbox, SugarSync, MobileMe and SVN to keep all of my various files in sync across my work iMac, my work PC, my home iMac, my laptop, my iPad, and my iPhone, and so it drives me crazy that if I add a new project to Coda at work that it doesn't automatically show up on my other machines.  I have to manually add the project and input all of the settings across all of my machines.

However, I found the simplest solution you could ask for simply by accident.  As I said, I have a MobileMe account that I utilize to keep my address book, keychains, textexpander, mail accounts, etc. etc. in sync.  Within MobileMe's settings you can select "Preferences" to sync.  I never realized that selecting this option syncs all of your applications preferences (or at least some of them) across your MobileMe-active machines including Coda and all of its saved settings and projects.

Now I can add a new project at work and when I get home and fire up Coda, the new project and all its settings are there and ready to go accomplishing a full sync of Coda across all my computers.

There are a few caveats to mention though...

This really does sync ALL of your preferences including things like the "Remote Path" and "Local Path" that you enter.  This leads to one major drawback.  You have to have the same local path to the files for that site which means you have to have the same username on every computer and keep your files in the exact some place within the file hierarchy on your machines.  For example, the local path for one of my projects is: /Users/Goon/Documents/SVN/clientnamehere.  Because the local path uses my username of "Goon", that will be synced across all of my computers.  If on one computer I have the username "Matt" instead of "Goon", Coda won't know where to access the local files for this project because it will be looking for a user named "Goon".  (I am actually just assuming all of this as I have the same username on all of my machines so I haven't been able to truly test this.  Maybe Coda is smart enough to figure it out and use a different username, but I thought this was worth mentioning just in case.)

If you're anything like me though, you are probably anal about having many things the same, so hopefully you have the same username and keep your project files in the same file structure on all of your machines.

The second caveat is that I don't think it syncs your clips.  I use TextExpander anyway so that isn't too big of a concern for me, but that could prove annoying to some people.  In this case, I'd highly recommend using TextExpander.  You can copy over all of your clips into TextExpander to use the same shortcuts and you can sync TextExpander using either MobileMe or Dropbox.  TextExpander is much more universal anyway allowing you to use it on pretty much any device.

Any other good Coda-syncing tips?  Comment below...

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