Uncategorized

Best Text Editor?

9:00AM April 30, 2008 | Adam Pash

You don’t have to be a programmer to appreciate the joys of plain text, and there’s no better way to wrangle your text files than a solid text editor. Plain text files are appealing because they’re searchable, lightweight, portable, and truly platform agnostic; plain text just makes life easier. With an abundance of excellent text editors available beyond your operating system’s default, choosing the best program to manipulate and manage your plain text files isn’t so easy. Luckily we’ve got you, our loyal readers. So for this week’s Hive Five, we want to hear all about your favourite text editor. Hit the jump for details and to nominate your favourite.


The first round of the Hive Five voting takes place in the comments, where you nominate your favourite tool for the job. We get hundreds of comments, so to make your nomination clear, please include it at the top of your comment like so: VOTE: Text Editor Goes Here. If you don’t follow this format, your vote may not be counted. After you’ve made your nomination, let us know what makes it stand out from the competition.

About the Hive Five: Our new feature series, the Hive Five, asks readers to answer the most frequently asked question we get—”Which solution is the best?” Once a week we’ll put out a call for contenders looking for the best solution to a certain problem, then YOU tell us your favourite tools to get a job done. A day later, we’ll report back with the top five recommendations and give you a chance to vote on which is best. For example, check out last week’s Best Contact Management Applications Hive Five.

Comments

  • Philip Esau

    April 30, 2008 at 12:18 PM

    VOTE: vim

    Vim is powerful, lightweight, available on most platforms, efficient, well-documented, keyboard driven, and fun :-).

  • Wakie

    April 30, 2008 at 12:26 PM

    VOTE: Notepad++

    http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

    This is the one I have been using for years. It uses tabs, has syntax highlighting which is great for all those programmers.

  • Jon

    April 30, 2008 at 12:28 PM

    VOTE: Textpad

  • Sam

    April 30, 2008 at 12:31 PM

    VOTE: PSPad

  • Dave

    April 30, 2008 at 12:46 PM

    VOTE:Vim

  • Jono

    April 30, 2008 at 1:33 PM

    Vote: Coda

    Almost the biggest reason why I eventually bought a Mac. Coda beautifully combines every tool a web coder/programmer needs.

  • Garth

    April 30, 2008 at 2:47 PM

    VOTE: bbedit

  • wook

    April 30, 2008 at 2:59 PM

    Vote: UltraEdit

    Been using it for years… as well as tabs, and syntax highlighting, it also lets you group files into ‘projects’ which is handy when you want to open a bunch of related files at the same time.
    It’s “Find In Files” function is superb allowing you to use Regex, and allowing you to do ‘replaces’ across multiple files (use with Caution!).
    I also like the ‘column’ select mode which is a handy way to copy and paste stuff out of the middle of a file.

  • Dave from Albury

    April 30, 2008 at 7:07 PM

    Windows: Vote: Edit Pad Lite
    *nix: Vote Nano
    OS X: Vote: Sub Etha Edit

  • poo

    May 1, 2008 at 1:31 AM

    Vote: Xpad (for OSX) – it’s brilliant!

  • simon

    May 1, 2008 at 9:20 AM

    VOTE: Crimson Editor

  • Dubai Boy

    October 31, 2008 at 8:09 PM

    I’ve tried pretty much most of them (listed above) – and they all have pluses and minuses and it’s really hard to say which one wins (this will probably depend on what your priorities and requirements/needs are). TextPad is slick and fast but does not handle unicode well – this pretty much limit’s for me. It’s sort is faster than UltraPad’s but again, if you have unicode in your data it’s lost. UltraPad is a bit slower to open, but on the other hand handles unicode well. The same is with EmEditor, a bit slover to open but it actualy opens the files very fast. I am working with 400MB+ files so this is a very important feature. If you are a developer and looking for a nice code editor Coda is awesome, UltraEdit will do the job as well. NotePad++ is nice and promising, good luck working with large files though. Nice GUI though. So, to sum it up – it all depends (like this is something new)… Cheers, Amar

Post Your Comments