HandCoding - Recommended Editors

http://www.webwriter.dk/ a danish made editor and its pretty good, of course in english

The editor: http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

The reasons: It highlights syntax in most forms of code including HTML,PHP and CSS; it has line numbering; it uses tabs; best of all it's free!!!

I used notepad for many, many years and finally got sick of trying to find single /'s or <'s etc that I might have inadvertantly missed. Crimson edit highlights the syntax as you are coding it, so you know where you have missed code as soon as it happens.

EditPlus 2 without a doubt.

Notepad++ (this is not Notepad2) It has the following basics: Syntax Highlighting, Programming Language Selection and Line Numbering (most important for debugging). It has some more features but you won't see 10 000 buttons, toolbars and help text.
It will also run programs from within the app if you are writing in an programs.

Dreamweaver is extremely heavy to use for regular page editing. It uses far too many system resources on Windows Boxes for what I need it for. I can use Notepad ++ and HTML-Kit on my PIII 600 with 128 MB SD-RAM and they run faster than Dreamweaver on my K7 1700XP with 700+MB RAM. It is like using a chainsaw to slice a loaf of bread - it will work - but it is way too much for the results.

BTW Dreamweaver is $200+ and the other editors are either Open Source or Freeware.

Jay
Developer/Consultant

I am just trialling Notepad 2, I have only one issue with it so far...it doesn't have tabs

I think I'll get deeper into crimsoneditor, thanks for another recommendation Julian.

I just downloaded Crimson Editor and it is pretty nice. I thought I had tried this on Linux once but maybe not. The only thing I don't like about it is that it, like HTML-Kit has limited syntax highlighting customization, compared to Notepad++ which can modify and customize. Notepad++ allows for designation of specific tags. You can modify the font, weight, size and color for each tag in a particular language. So if you want all your comments to be 16pt, #333333, and bold italics you can. If you want to have all classes in a CSS file to be Arial and orange, you can.

Julian, Notepad++ has tabs. Other great features are collapsable elements and auto wrap with a character to show the wrap.

One other distinction I have noticed is that in Crimson's built in directory tree it is not able to show the network drives. I have all my website files on my testing server in my office but I don't have ftp enabled on it so I would have to create mapped network drives. That is so windows 98!

Jay

I still use notepad all the way,
I tried DW but never liked it at all, So I just left it and went back to my best friend...NOTEPAD