Columbus, Ohio

Free Text Editors Reviewed

It has been a while since I looked at using a different text editor. I have been a die hard SciTE user for the past 4 years. Today though I thought I would look at some other editors and see if they would meet my needs.

SciTE Home Page: http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html

First, I went to Wikipedia to review the list of text editors available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_text_editors

I also found a wiki that compares most of the popular editors with a shareware editor called Edit Plus.

I visited the web sites to most of the free text editors. Through the process of elimination, limited my testing to two editors, Notepad++ and PSPad.

Notepad++
I was pretty blown away by the number of features that are packaged in Notepad++. IT also uses the Scintilla text control, which is found in SciTE. The only big feature that was missing in this editor was the api function arguments tool tips, sometimes referred to as call tips. This is one of the main reasons I use SciTE to this day. If someone could add this logic to the FunctionList plugin then I may be willing to switch to Notepad++.

PSPad
PSPad had some features listed that really got my attention. Once I downloaded and installed, I was really disappointed. I was under the impression that TopStyle Light was integrated into PSPad. All PSPad does is launch TopStyle Lite. On top of that, PSPad does not include code folding and quite frankly, has so many menu options I was overwhelmed.

TopStyle Lite
If there is one thing I did find from this search was TopStyle Lite. This CSS editor works reasonably well. I think Dreamweaver 8’s CSS editor has a cleaner interface but if you don’t have the cash to buy Dreamweaver and you want a CSS specific editor, then I would recommend this for sure.

I am going to stick with SciTE for now.

What text editor do you recommend?

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