What's the best text editor actually?

[Andy Huang]

I use EmEditor because of character encoding and other neat features.

[BassX]

E Text Editor for Windows is promising.

It's still in beta and it's feature set is still a work in progress. It's looking to be a clone of TextMate for Windows - the developer is working with TextMate's developer to make it work with TextMate's bundles, etc.

[Quillz]

Are there any text editors out there that show a webpage display of the coding as you do it. So you can see as you code how it will look online

I think any rich-text editor will do this, so try Dreamweaver, FrontPage or Nvu.

[Vile]

Another vote for TextPad

[simsim]

I use EmEditor because of character encoding and other neat features.

What character encoding features that this editor provide & not others?

I think any rich-text editor will do this, so try Dreamweaver, FrontPage or Nvu.

Dreamweaver & FrontPage are more categorized as IDEs rather than rich-text editors.

[Jerry]

What's the best text editor actually?

Very subjective, it's the same as asking a mechanic what are the best tools, a lot will say Snap On others wont.

I know that I am more productive with certain tools over others depending on the job, and that will vary from person to person.

[Quillz]

E Text Editor for Windows is promising.

It's still in beta and it's feature set is still a work in progress. It's looking to be a clone of TextMate for Windows - the developer is working with TextMate's developer to make it work with TextMate's bundles, etc.

Nice... I've been hoping for a TextMate clone/port to Windows and/or Linux for a while. Hopefully this is it.

[Dream]

The E TextEditor looks very interesting, thanks for sharing the link. I'm gonna try it out.

Very subjective, it's the same as asking a mechanic what are the best tools, a lot will say Snap On others wont.

I know that I am more productive with certain tools over others depending on the job, and that will vary from person to person.

Not sure what to tell you... I was looking forward for a discussion about the best text editors, not the actual best text editor, I wrote it wrong. I'm looking for something that can beat Homesite for me in features, usability etc. It would be cool if you could say what are the best tools you describe for you and for what purposes you use them.

Also, I'm not so sure I need a text editor that highlights EVERYTHING, but that's me. Highlighting even the $ sign in PHP seems a little too much, like EditPlus does.

[Dark Zero]

UltraEdit here

[urdu]

i use Notepad++

[Jerry]

It would be cool if you could say what are the best tools you describe for you and for what purposes you use them.

In that case I use jEdit for just about everything as I do a lot of dev where its best to have a comprehensive and easily customizable IDE, having a big list on online plugins makes that easier to manage, Textpad as a scratch pad.

On a minor point, having it in Java means I can run it on a server and export the display so it doesn't matter what desktop I'm on I don't loose the context of my dev environment.

All barning the version control is in there at the moment.

[Dean C]

My personal preferences are:

Java - eclipse
PHP - Ultraedit
C# - Visual Studio
Lisp - emacs

[simsim]

What are you programming with LISP for, Dean?

[Dean C]

What are you programming with LISP for, Dean?

I did a module at university this year on Software for AI. We used LISP to develop a semi-intelligent knowledge base for our coursework, and after despising the language at first, I grew to love it. It isn't ideal for all tasks, but it's great for others, as is the case with most programming languages.

[simsim]

Yes, I know LISP is used extensively in AI-related projects. I read about it many years ago, got introduced to it's basic syntax, but never considered learning it. Was the project related to linguistics?