Anyone who manages a website knows that you spend quite a lot of time in your FTP client of choice. This is one of those few areas where I simply must have my mac, because the FTP clients out for Windows are absolutely horrible. (well, except for Windows’ built-in FTP in explorer, which is really quite good for basic tasks and puts Apple’s similar efforts to shame) All the Windows clients are a mess of buttons with no labels, and feel like they were designed by someone who couldn’t decide what he loved more: DOS or UNIX. In absolute stark contrast, Fetch has been the mac client ever since ever and it is really quite a nice program. Nowadays, though, with Mac OS X and modern Cocoa software, there are some great options like FTPeel and Interarchy. My personal favorite though, is Panic Software’s Transmit.


Transmit is not only beautifully designed and deceptively simple, but is also incredibly reliable—something of real import when we’re talking about FTP and one’s web site. The main interface looks like this:

As someone who deals quite heavily with images and photos for his web site, I really appreciate Transmit dynamic preview pane, which includes a zoom feature for images as well:

Transmit also has a really well implemented sync feature:

But for me, the absolute kicker is the Edit in External Editor feature. This allows you to specify your external editor (something else of which the mac has a great selection) in the preferences:

Then, when you go to edit a file that is on the server, it downloads it to a temp folder and opens it in your editor of choice. As soon as you make changes and hit save, it re-uploads the file to the server. Beautiful and seamless.

Update: Here’s a video of the process.