Today I added a third reusable component to my website (let’s call it C3), but I had all sorts of trouble making it register with the app (i.e. it wouldn’t appear in the drop down list when I was trying to apply it.) Anyway, it eventually started working, but then after updating the whole site, something very strange happened. Another component (C2) disappeared from several pages. When I looked at the HTML, I saw that it had been replaced with the wrong component (C1)!
This really just adds to the feeling I’ve been having for a while… that for all Pinegrows’s amazing features, working around the general bugginess probably costs me more time than the features save me.
Even just basic copy and paste operations behave in unpredictable ways. For example, in any other text-based app, if you select some text, then paste with the keyboard shortcut, the pasted text will replace the selected text—but not in Pinegrow. Instead, you end up with both the old code and the new. This has bitten me more times than I can count. At other times I end up with something really strange and unpredictable happening and I’m not even sure how or why it happened. If I start hitting undo, it’s not always obvious what’s going to happen. I just don’t feel confident that I’m not going to make things worse.
I’ve really, really wanted to like Pinegrow, so many times I will put it down to my relative inexperience with the app, and tell myself I must find the time to do all the tutorials, etc, to learn the intended way of doing things. But you know, I’ve been working in this field for a couple of decades now, and I’ve lost count of the number of apps I’ve learnt in that time. Pinegrow just doesn’t feel like the most solid and reliable app to me… and when you’re using it to make global changes to your website, you need it to be solid and reliable more than anything else.
Does anyone else feel like this, or do I need to give Pinegrow more of a chance? Right now I’m starting to regret my purchase and want to drop back to coding in a text editor like Coda. It’s old and far more basic, but by golly it’s predictable.