Coding tools are very personal things to developers.  There’s an emotional attachment to the software we use to get things done and dramatic changes, or being forced off a particular coding tool or IDE is jarring.  Early during my ColdFusion development career, HomeSite+ or ColdFusion Studio was the de facto standard for coding in ColdFusion.  It had full support for the language and offered nice development shortcuts to get things done more quickly and easily.  Later on, I switched to Dreamweaver.  Sure, it had visual layout tools and would generate some (pretty bad) code for you, but it still supported the ColdFusion language and made it easy for me to get my work done.

Then… the worst happened.  Adobe chose to strip ColdFusion support out of Dreamweaver.  It was a dark day for me.  Something I was comfortable with and used every day no longer did what I needed it to do.  I was forced to find a replacement.

I recognize that Adobe has ColdFusion builder, which is based off of Eclipse.  In my experience, using CFBuilder is overkill when I’m primarily a hand-coder who doesn’t need (or want) a full IDE to be able to create code.  I generally equate CF Builder as “using a Mack truck to go get groceries.”  It just does so much more than I need it to do.  I want lean, fast, lightweight code editing with 100% language support.

As such, I’ve used Sublime as my primary editor ever since Dreamweaver dropped ColdFusion support.  It’s been great.  With the CFML Package installed I have access to the full language… at least I haven’t come across anything that isn’t supported.

However… the CFML Package isn’t created or maintained by Adobe.  It’s not an “official” language package for Sublime.  Some other editors like Atom, Brackets, and Visual Studio Code also lack official support from Adobe for the ColdFusion language.  For a while, I had high hopes for the cfBrackets plug in, but it stopped being updated shortly after CF 11 came out and never had support for script, so it died on the vine for me, and again, was community driven; not provided by Adobe.

Which leads me to my point.  Adobe can Improve the ColdFusion community by providing official support for more code editors.  It’s that simple.  Creating an official plug in that supports 100% of the language can’t be that difficult if people are willing to do it on their own for free.  If it has to be monetized, then by all means monetize it.  I’d happily pay a stipend for an officially supported plug in for my favourite code editor that is always up to date without having to be forced to use CF Builder as the only “official” option for code writers.

Figure out what the most popular code editors are and start producing official Adobe plug ins for those editors.  Many developers believe that Adobe doesn’t push/promote ColdFusion enough as it is.  Creating and maintaining a plug in for other code editors could be a way to show that you support the developers who code in ColdFusion by supporting different ways for them to write the language.

My $0.02.