Monthly Archive for May, 2007

After talking to Del about jQuery and editors with intelliSense, I thought i’d take a look at Aptana – “a free, open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript-focused development environment for building Ajax applications”. While downloading this, it occurred to me that I currently use 4 different text editors, and really, I could probably just use one. After all, it’s just text!

I currently use the following editors: Notepad++ (for PHP and editing scripts when I dont want to fire up a full-blown IDE to eat system resources), HomeSite (for XHTML, CSS, JS,ASP), FlashDevelop (for Actionscript), and IDLE (for Python. So rarely do i use this i’ll forget about it for now).

Here’s a short write-up for each editor i’ve been reviewing and their good and bad points:

Notepad++

Lightweight editor, supports multiple languages, extremely fast to load up. Missing some features like a file browser and (s)FTP. Overall very impressed. £Free

HomeSite

I dont think this has been updated for years. I’m using 4.5 which was released in 1999-2000! That IS old! Still, it works reasonably well, with an integrated IE browser, and supports multiple languages. I’d really like to get away from using Homesite. £102

FlashDevelop

I used to use SEPY for editing Actionscript, but something drove me towards FD instead. It’s good at what it does… but of course, it only supports Actionscript, which is a pain. It’s not the speediest editor to load either. £free

E- TextEditor

The Windows equivalent of TextMate. Reasonably fast to load, and supports multiple languages through the use of TextMate bundles. I haven’t managed to get it working with the Actionscript bundle yet
There’s a good screencast on their site which is worth watching. TextEditor has the most amazing feature i’ve seen so far: Select multiple areas of text, and then start typing. Watch the screencast to see it in action: I think it’s amazing! $35 per year.

Aptana [screenshots] [videos]

I really like this open-source editor. It’s extremely good for XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’ll even show you which browsers support different properties. It supports (s)FTP. No support for Actionscript yet though Slow to load, but worth it. It’s built on Eclipse, yet I find it easier to use than Eclipse. £free

Eclipse

From it’s credentials Eclipse should be the best editor out there. At the moment I find it impenetrable and unintuitive. If someone who uses it regularly spent an hour guiding me through it, i’d probably get on with it better, but until then, I can’t consider it an option. A shame as it’s free, and via the enormous amount of plugins available, it supports all the languages I need! £free

Conclusion
Well, I can’t draw a definitive conclusion on this, as i’ll continue evaluating more text editors, and hopefully one day I’ll learn to live with Eclipse. It’s got to be the way forward, as it’s so powerful, and its available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

For now? I’ll continue using Notepad++ for quick and easy editing of most files, and use FlashDevelop for Actionscript. I guess the only change will be using Aptana for web development. Perhaps that’ll help me get into the Eclipse IDE as well.