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Favorite programming text editor?

Fryguy8

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 26, 2001
Messages
1,707
I'm somewhat used to using vim in linux, but now I'm looking for a solution on the windows platform. I'm aware that vim is available here as well, but I was wondering what other people liked? Looking for something to do html, css, php, java, c/c++, assembly, python, etc. Just a basic "coder-oriented" text editor.
 
I swear by EditPlus. Syntax highlighting and autocomplete for nearly everything imaginable, regex-powered find-and-replace, and more cool stuff. $30.
 
notepad2

syntax highlighting, paren/brace highlighting, auto tab, no inline code completion but that's expected from such a lightweight program. notepad2 is great when i don't want to wait for the ide to load.

btw, it's a drop in replacement for regular notepad
 
Scite is awesome. Supports a huge range of languages (C, C++, Python, CSS, Java, Perl, etc). You can search with regexes, and it has more features.

Amazing that it's free, too.
 
any of you guys ever try vim?

edit: I also like the looks of that scite editor, since it's crossplatform, I won't have to get used to 2 different environments
 
Fryguy8 said:
any of you guys ever try vim?

Yes, it's my favorite Linux/Unix text editor. As a programming editor, it sometimes gets on my nerves, but I use it a lot for quick editing of files, or when I'm in the console.
 
textpad is a nice light-weight one.

though, the best ide I've ever used is Borland's JBuilder (can you say "code standarized to hell"? (meaning if you have a coding standard, this program can be config'd to obey it to the dot.))

Tho, that's only for Java =P
 
Well, it's not terribly lightweight, but Eclipse can be made to do pretty much anything (although it's primarily for Java, and it's a full IDE, not just a text editor). I know there's a C/C++ plugin for it, and there are loads of PHP/HTML plugins. Take a look, you might like it. Code completion, projects, decent searching, it's got pretty much everything you'll ever need. Except that it's written in Java :p
 
+1 for Edit Plus.

The only things it's missing are Window Tranparency and Hex editing.

UltraEdit covers the Hex Editing and MetaPad covers the transparency.

Consider Crimson Editor the free version of Edit Plus.

I do like Gvim for Windows. I also like XEmacs. Both of these are annoying to configure though.

For me, an editor needs to support an unlimited number of columns. UltraEdit has a 20,000 limit. EditPlus has no limit that I'm aware of. It's over a million though.

I still have to try eclipse. Haven't felt like downloading it yet though.
 
Shadow2531 said:
I still have to try eclipse. Haven't felt like downloading it yet though.
Bear in mind that Eclipse itself is 80MB of download, plus the various plugins and stuff. Be prepared for a long evening of finding and downloading stuff.

If you fancy doing JSP/Servlets and Struts, it'd be worth considering MyEclipseIDE (www.myeclipseide.com) - it's only $30, and adds such a boatload of stuff that it's almost invaluable if you're into Java web development. Be warned that if you're running your database and Java container on the same machine as Eclipse, you're going to need at least 768MB RAM.

I find that Eclipse has one major advantage over JBuilder (ie it's free), and it's far more logical than NetBeans. Can't beat it for Java development.
 
Another +1 for EditPlus, it even has an upload feature that comes in handy when doing PHP, and like said above a ton of cool features.

If not then TextPad is a pretty good one too.
 
JEdit is a pretty good one too.

http://www.jedit.org

It's cross platform, and works for a majority of languages, although it started primarily for Java. It has a pretty strong open-source following, and supports plug-ins too.
 
I also put in a vote for JEdit. Supports a large number of languages and all of the syntax highlighting is defined with XML, so you can write your own or edit an existing one if need be or desired.
 
My preference as of late is Dreamweaver MX. I have been using it just for it's text editing abilities mainly due to the fact that most other editors do not yet support sftp connections, so I can open and save the files directly on the server.
 
Well... I have been using notepad till now, just downloaded notepad2 and will be using it from now on methinks :)

Dano.
 
Fryguy8 said:
I'm somewhat used to using vim in linux, but now I'm looking for a solution on the windows platform. I'm aware that vim is available here as well, but I was wondering what other people liked? Looking for something to do html, css, php, java, c/c++, assembly, python, etc. Just a basic "coder-oriented" text editor.
If you haven't used Vim under Windows yet (you made it sound like maybe you haven't tried yet, though you know it's possible), I highly recommend that you try it out. It generally integrates quite well. It's got a decent Windows installer (plays nice with the "Add / Remove Programs"). One of the most useful things is the optional (during install) right-click "Edit with Vim" in Explorer. It's so nice being able to quickly pop open absolutely anything. Works well with Cygwin, too, if you're into that kind of thing. I also have yet to see a file type that it didn't have syntax hilighting for: practically every programming and markup language, configuration files of all types (.ini, Apache httpd.conf, .htaccess, Java .properties files), e-mails; the list goes on.

If you're still somewhat new to Vim, someone here pointed out Cream to me recently. I can't say I've used it, but it may help.
 
+1 for TextPad (www.textpad.com) for C++, Java, low-end PHP, etc.

+2 for Dreamweaver MX 2004 - after trying it, I fell in love with it. Before trying it, I never liked it and never wanted to try it. But, after I saw another person using it, I downloaded it, played around with it, and then fell in love with it. It's hella expensive, though.

If you're looking for a low-end text editor, then I recommend using TextPad. But, otherwise, use Dreamweaver MX 2004 or whatever you can get your hands on. I definitely recommend it for websites or anything dealing with PHP.

TextPad also allows the possibility for highlighting different code syntaxes depending on what the file type is. If you open a C++ file, it highlights the C++ syntax. A PHP file will highlight PHP syntax. :D

here's to being repetitive :)
 
I actually used kate on cygwin/X for a while, but I suppose running on non-windows, displaying on windows doesn't count as "for the windows platform" :D
(And the cygwin port of kde ... :( )
 
if we're talking full IDEs as well, then i like maguma studio for php. there used to be a free version which i have, not sure about its current status though. i tried a php plugin for eclipse a few months ago that wasn't good enough for me, i haven't checked in a while for one though, i oughtta, but eclipse takes a while to load.
 
Well, as we're still discussing.

For free:

I still recommend SciTE. Very extensible, you can even add highlighting for whatever language it doesn't support by default. You can also set what program to use to build your code.

Eclipse - I do like Eclipse, but I must agree that it's slow to load, mainly since it has to load the Java VM first. It was my favorite Java IDE, if that means much...

Textpad - eh, it's okay. Never really liked it myself. And I guess it's not really free.

MingW Developer Studio - I have not used it myself, and it's a C/C++ IDE mainly. Pretty good from what I hear.

Emacs - ooooo, I am more the vim guy myself, but just throwing it out there.

Notepad+ - a drop in replacement for Notepad. Notepad2 is probably better than Notepad+ though, but my drop in replacement was always Metapad.

Commercial editors:
Dreamweaver MX - I like it, but mostly only for web coding.

Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2003 - not bad, I only use it for C# though.

Slickedit - great editor, but pricey.

I've not used editplus though.
 
i actually used metapad before i discovered notepad 2
 
I use UltraEdit-32 all the time. Highlighting is ok for stuff like C and C++. I mainly use it since it's also a pretty good hex editor.
 
Textpad is a great simple editor, even lets you add your own classes and syntax highlighting.
 
haven't had a chance to mess around with the others yet, but I've been using scite and I like it a LOT. has all of the features I want, except being able to view multiple files in same window (a la textpad, with the project tree on the left).

Thanks for the input so far guys.
 
SubEthaEdit is awesome, dont know why no one has mentioned it yet ..ahem..
Features from their site
Regular expression search and replace
Eight different regex flavors: Posix, Posix Extended, Emacs, grep, GNU, Java, Perl, Ruby
Per document list–of–found with colored regex groups
Safari-powered live-updating HTML preview
Full Unicode™ support
Show invisible characters
File encodings support
File encodings conversion
Line ending conversion
Blockedit
Autocompletion
Enhanceable (e.g. with WordService)
Text conversion, statistics, custom keybindings, etc.
Multiple Views (Windows) per File


And collaborative mode so to speak.
You can share it on the network and other people can read, or read write with text chat. I dont use that too much but its an awesome feature
http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/
 
sigmend said:
SubEthaEdit is awesome, dont know why no one has mentioned it yet ..ahem..

Probably because its for MAC OSX.

Looks like a nice program though.
 
Well if I am not using Visual Studio, Ultra Edit is my favorite. I use version 10.x. I am not sure if they have a newer version but my year sub ran out during the 10s so t hat is what I use. I doubt they could have improved it much more, it does everything anyone would ever care for.
 
I give another vote for gvim. If you master gvim, I don't think any other text editor can come close. Its just a much steeper learning curve. One of the main benefits is that once you type a function or class name you can press ctrl+n (I think thats the right sequence) and it does word completion so you never have to retype any long words out.
 
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