## Getting around in Coda

Coda is a powerful web development environment with many features. Let's first get acquainted with some of Coda's core concepts.

Sites

Coda uses the term "site" to refer to a work environment and collection of settings for a single particular project you're working on. You might configure one site for your personal home page, another site for your company's website, and so on. It's typical for Coda users to create one site per domain name that they maintain, although there is no hard and fast rule about this. How many sites you create is up to you. See Using sites for more information.

The tab bar

Across the top of the window is the tab bar. The tab bar shows thumbnails of all open tabs, and indicates which tab you're currently viewing with a highlighted border.

The first two tabs are fixed, and cannot be closed. They show your sites and your files, respectively. See Using sites and Using the files tab for more information.

You can create a new tab by clicking the plus button on the right hand side of the tab bar.

You can create as many tabs as you like. There are four different kinds of tabs which can be created: Document, Terminal, Book, and MySQL.

- Document tabs allow you to open and modify text files, as well as preview web content. See Editing text for more information. Document tabs have a color-coded strip at the bottom of their icon that varies according to the type of file being edited (HTML, CSS, etc.)
- Terminal tabs allow you to open an SSH connection to a remote computer, or a command line interface to the Mac you're working on. See Using the terminal for more information.
- Book tabs allow you quick access to reference material, such as documentation for common programming languages. See Viewing reference books for more information.
- MySQL tabs allow you to connect to local or remote MySQL database servers. See Managing MySQL databases for more information.

The sidebar

Each tab except the sites tab also contains a utility sidebar. See Using the sidebar for more information.

The path bar

Each document tab contains a path bar, which runs along the top of the document. This shows you the path to the document, and serves as a shortcut for opening other nearby files. See Using the path bar for more information.

Splits

Any open tab can be split vertically or horizontally, up to four ways. See Splitting tabs for more information.