Software programmers love things that are free, such as free and open source software and freeware. Developers also love their text editors. Over my development experience I have used a ton of editors. As a programmer I like an editor with code and syntax highlighting, code folding, tabs, and all the bells and whistles.
Here are the top text editors that I use, in no particular order. All of the text editors listed below are installed in my home and development machines.
- jEdit – The primer Java-based editor.
- Vim – Vi Improved.
- Scintilla SciTE – My Windows-based editor of choice.
- Notepad++ – Free source code editor and Notepad replacement, based on Scintilla.
- Notepad 2 – Also based on Scintilla.
- Komodo Edit – Free editor based on Komodo IDE. Komodo Edit has a nice FireFox extension project support.
- Jext – Free source code editor written in Java.
- ConTEXT – ConTEXT is a small, fast and powerful freeware text editor.
- TextWrangler – My favorite general purpose text editor for Mac.
Even though they are not free, there are some great commercial text editors too. Many Rails enthusiasts use TextMate on OS X. I also seen a lot of programmers use UltraEdit.
If I missed your favorite text editor, feel free to tell me about it in the comments. I’m always open to try a new editor out.
Technorati Tags: editor, programming, programmers, jedit, jext, scintilla, vim
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9 Comments
On our job, we are using PSPad. It’s pretty good. Free.
http://www.pspad.com/
Hey, where is Emacs?
E-Texteditor is a windows version of Mac’s TextEditor with similar features.
http://www.andhapp.com/blog/post/Future-is-bright-Future-is-ETextEditor/33
My choice of editor depends on what I’m doing at that moment (I’m mainly writing ruby on linux):
* quick scripts (
I’ve been using E for the last year or so. It’s pretty sweet for Windows… but lately it seems to be bogging down quickly. Could be my problem, though.
I once gave a try to aptana and it is a very good editor/IDE, imho.
If I came back to rails coding again, that would be my choice.
I forgot to mention the aptana radrails plugin.
Hey… great list with some programs I have not seen, or tried — yet. I like Aptana too, and recommend you take a look at these:
AMAYA the “official” W3C Editor (see: http://webhelpermagazine.com/?p=215)
FireFox WebDeveloper Extension (see: http://webhelpermagazine.com/?p=261)
Yours, Scott
Amaya is W3C’s own versatile editor/browser. With the extremely fast moving nature of Web technology, Amaya plays a central role at the Consortium. Easily extended to integrate new ideas into its design, Amaya provides developers with many specialized features including multiple views, where the internal structural model of the document can be displayed alongside the browser’s view of how it should be presented on the screen