Summer 2003 - the best web editors

Which HTML/CSS/PERL/PHP editor do you use?

[waldemar]

I'm curious what software you guys and gals are using for your web coding. Not that I am not happy with my editors, but I want to keep track if I missed another great, slim but powerful program...

I don't want to go a minimalistic ("Notepad is all I need") or 'maximalistic' (the new MS Web Developers Suite that needs 2 GB and 2,5 GHz) way here, just suggestions for nice software, that might also help new-to-web-programers avoid the frontpage trap.

HTML/CSS/PHP

TopStyle

The split screen preview window is great (it synchronizes on-the-fly); loads of options for individual window layouts; built-in HTMLTidy, validator (calls external); easy-to-use tag/style inspector lists all options at the cursor position. It can't do PERL though.

HomeSite

I used before TS; is still on the harddrive because of it's "extendet search & replace" that affects all (patterned, like *.htm¦.html, etc.) files in some folder you choose. Since Macromedia bought it I get the impression it's running slower though.

What are you using? Anything special for PHP/PERL?

[pixel_juice]

See [webmasterworld.com...]

I recently started using html kit, and i've been extremely impressed with the range of features and plugins. It's good for PHP too. I'll be sticking with it for a while at least. I've been through most of the more well known editors out there, including homesite.

>>extendet search & replace

There's a really nice (freeware) program that does this called BK Replace Em.

[jatar_k]

or here
What's the best Text Editor [webmasterworld.com]

[txbakers]

We do have a site search available, which will bring up lots of answers to basic questions such as these.

[SlowMove]

Use Dreamweaver for prototyping and templates. Other than that, it's UltraEdit. Ctrl-W to toggle wordwrap is one of a thousand things that you just can't do in notepad.

[Robino]

EditPlus and TextPad. Both are very reliable. EditPlus has some very cool color (display) coding for PHP.

[ShawnR]

I haven't seen my favourite mentioned in the threads that Jatar or pixel_juice suggested, so here goes: Crimson

[waldemar]

pixel_juice + txbaker: forgive, I didn't find that wysiwyg thread :-(... jatar: that one's from 2001 :-) I was hoping to get an overview over the current editor situation...

search & replace / There's a really nice (freeware) program that does this called BK Replace Em

Thanks pixel! Looks interesting.

I got a perl editor recommendation simply named "webedit" or "webeditor" but since this is a very commonly used named, I don't know which/where/what......
Mayb he meant / Has anybody tried that "Namo Web Editor" which was reviewed to be a "better frontpage"? Looks interesting too with database connectivity and mighty import functions...

[tonmo]

Big fan of NoteTab Pro myself.

[edited by: tonmo at 1:20 pm (utc) on June 29, 2003]

[TheWhippinpost]

HTML-Kit is excellent. If there's one downside for me though, it's the menu; stuff can be hard to find - Maybe that's 'cos there's so much though!

On the Perl front; I quite like DZSoftPerl and Tavrida. I've also downloaded SannySoft which looks promising though I haven't tried it yet.

[Nick_W]

Vim [vim.org] for EVERYTHING! ;)

Nick

[Mohamed_E]

Emacs plus a customized html-mode.el and a very simple but neat html-toc.el (for Table of Contents generation).

Followed by html-tidy in batch mode for validation.

[waldemar]

On the Perl front; I quite like DZSoftPerl [...]

One thing I really need on editors is an all present file list (project or folder) so I can quickly move between different files. DZSoftPerl does neither have that nor supports multiple open documents. I heard the DZSoftPerl recommendation before but besides the syntax and object list I don't see many advantages. Also I found the cursor handling to be a little strange (it ignores end of lines, you can place the cursor anywhere)... Help, what's so great about it? Shall I have a look at Tavrida or "SannySoft"?

[jatar_k]

that one's from 2001

and aside from crimson i don't see any difference. ;)

[waldemar]

and aside from crimson i don't see any difference. ;)

That's what I intended to ask for... ;)

[TheWhippinpost]

Help, what's so great about it? Shall I have a look at Tavrida or "SannySoft"?

TBH, I must have about half a dozen Perl editors on-board and none of them are ideal but ya know how it is, ya tend to gravitate to the "best" of the bunch, which as i said, for me at least is DZ and Tavrida.

OptiPerl would probably be my "real" choice but I won't buy it out of principle 'cos the demo was sooo restrictive and misleading - a 4k max filesize FFS! - It really gets my goat when you install someones software only to discover
on use that it's barely workable, but anyway I did like the regex utility, probably the best I've come across...even though that was severely restricted too!

Tavrida has some cool features, especially the html table-builder wizard which lets you build a table programatically. It also has a regex util which I've used with varying success. The thing that lets it down is the help-files though because the authors' natural language is not English and that maybe why I'm not getting the best use out of certain features I dunno - Worth a download however.

iPerlExpress is quite good as well though I find it unstable on my system.

As I said, I've not tried SannySoft out yet, hence the cautionary, "sounds promising" statement, but the writing on the tin...sounded promising.

[TheDoctor]

See also [webmasterworld.com ]

[claus]

I personally like features like these:
Multiple open files, search and replace (even with regexps) across files, and open document lists.

Sometimes I even find these relevant: syntax highlighting, and customizable code libraries (html, js, css, perl, php, whatever).

NoteTab supports this. If i occasionally need to edit a 1Gb text file (database/logs) i'll use UltraEdit that, by the way, also supports these features as well as FTP and S&R in un-opened files on disk.

wysiwyg is not at all important to me as i use browsers to display results and for validation i use w3c.

As for perl and php, i run widows on my development machine but have activeperl installed. I've never needed a webserver on my development machine, although some MS-server thang has tried to get itself installed on a couple of occasions, but apache works on widows too.

/claus