Style doesn’t count for much in the nitty-gritty world of text editing, but if you’re going to stare at a piece of software all day, an elegant user interface is definitely a plus. When I revisited the app and grabbed the new 2.0 release, I was almost immediately taken with it. Well, I’d already found it before, but in an earlier beta form that didn’t do everything I needed. Every few months, I downloaded a couple of new editors, tried them for a while, and then discarded them.Īnd then I found Sublime Text. (E Text Editor sort of counts as a Windows port, but last I checked, it wasn’t feature complete.)ĭispirited, I continued my search on the Windows side. Unfortunately, there was no Windows version. It did everything I wanted just the way I wanted, and it felt a million times more polished than Notepad++. Meanwhile, on my MacBook, I found what seemed like the holy grail: TextMate. Syntax highlighting was ugly, and the the program seemed to forget all my customizations every so often, but I soldiered on. The regular expression implementation was limited, but I found ways around that. Macro support wasn’t great, but I got by. In the end, I settled on Notepad++, which seemed to have the least obnoxious interface and a pretty good set of features. ![]() I tried Crimson Editor, E Text Editor, EditPlus, EmEditor, Notepad2, TextPad, UltraEdit, and many others I’ve now forgotten about. So I tried a whole smorgasbord of editors. I felt like I ought to find a more capable editor and stretch my wings a little. The default syntax highlighting isn’t too great, though, and I ran into limitations with the built-in regular expression support. Scite happily supports macros and other niceties, and it’s got a pretty barebones user interface. I started out with Scite, which served me well for… oh, probably four of those six years. Besides that, I double as TR’s resident web designer and CSS monkey, which involves long hours of code editing. We can insert custom tags and images at our leisure, and we’re not at the mercy of Microsoft Word’s godawful rich text to HTML conversion. See, while we’ve got a pretty excellent content management system here at TR, the gang and I do most of our writing in plain text in our editors of choice. I’ve spent the past six years or so making daily use of those smaller, less intimidating editors. Others are smaller, more nimble, and less reliant on arcane text commands from the days of disco and BBSes. ![]() ![]() Some of them are so feature-rich they’re almost operating systems unto themselves. I mean, there are perfectly good ones out there that cost absolutely nothing. Okay, so I never dreamed I’d ever spend $59 on a text editor.
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