text editors for windows
My List
Notepad++
I know most people use notepad++ but I don’t like it. It has a clumsy and cluttered interface. There are a few cool features; however, I suspect the main reason why it is so popular is it is an opensource texteditor.
Notepad2
I love using Notepad2 to do quick things or look at config files. It has a large amount of languages for syntax highlighting and is very quick to load. It also fits nicely on a thumb stick for working on those computers without a decent text editor. I use it for quick edits and it has VBScript highlighting which I find useful when I am looking at VB files and don’t really need Visual Studio’s bloat.
e.TextEditor
A blatant clone of textmate. They even say it is on the home page. It has almost all the same features as Textmate, but a lot of them need cygwin to run. I have downloaded the demo a couple times. I have had it lock up on me a few times, but that was about a year ago. Also the way it does projects, while I like it, is somewhat awkward and needs a little work. There should aleast be a refresh button and an easier way to save file directly to a folder. For $35 it’s not a bad price ( a lot cheaper than UltraEdit ).
Intype
My second favorite vaporware (First is Duke4). It has been in alpha since jan 2007. It also is a textmate clone even though they say it isn’t. It’s fast. For what it can do it is really fast. Unfortunatly, its dev cycle is really slow. Intype has a long ways to go. I was using the Alpha 0.3 release for over a year and am still waiting for the next alpha. Right now it isn’t tabbed text editor with pretty colors ( I love pretty colors). In one of the unstable releases, it has a project manager, but it was as the title said: unstable. You can see the potential in the design and the developer is very capable of adding all the features need.
Sublime Text
This is a really cool text editor. A lot of cool things are this that I haven’t found in other text editors. It is setup to quickly create and reorganize split views with multiple documents; the pane on the left shows a birds eye view of the entire document; it allow multiple text selection. ( yah, you can select multiple noncontinuous lines of code and it’s not awkward to do). There are a few drawbacks with sublime text. It seems a little buggy. More than once it ran away with my cpu and I had to kill the process. It is a bit of a memory hog even on small files. Also, it costs $60. I’d buy it right now for $20, once the issues with the resources are fixed $30, and when projects are added $40.
Conclusion
Personally, I have settled on e.TextEditor with a splash of Notepad2. I like the familiarity of e.TextEditor because I only use TextMate on my mac. I like the speed of Notepad2 for quick edits.
Side Note
I left a few off the list such as UltraEdit and Programmers notepad. They are fine tools, I just don’t care for them. I am old and picky and like pretty things.