E, Powerful Windows Text Editor, Now Out of Beta
Earlier in the year I introduced you to Intype, a Windows text editor that looked promising despite being in the alpha stage of development. Six months later Intype is still in alpha and not exactly ready for people to use full-time. Enter e. The e text editor has come out of beta and can be had in a stable final release.
It combines support of popular TextMate bundles, personal revision control, a familiar interface (if you’ve used TextMate), and integration of cygwin for a unix scripting environment (ultra handy if you often deal with Ruby, Perl, etc).
Similar to TextMate, e is not free and will run you a moderate $35 USD. I obviously don’t do a lot of work on Windows boxes and I previously used the mediocre (in my opinion) Notepad ++ editor, but I think e is pretty much as close as you can get to a stable version of TextMate on Windows. You can take e for a test drive with their trial download here (4.5MB).
What text editor do you use when coding in Windows?
Thanks to Trish Jones for the tip.
I use emacs.
Learning curve is a bitch, but it does *everything*.
Paul,
There is a typo on the second to last sentence. “What do you”.
Personally, I use Notepad. Sometimes Jcreator.
Great timing. My Mac is on the fritz and I’ve had to move over to Windows until I get it fixed up. I use Textmate on the Mac. I tried a bunch of Windows editors and finally settled on PSPad (http://www.pspad.com/en/). It’s free, has a decent Project manager, and the kinds of tools I need. The one thing I miss is a way to fold functions and other code blocks up.
With editors, the thing is that everyone has a different set of requirements so I don’t think there’s a ‘1 size fits all’ editor out there.
I did actually look at e in beta but didn’t like the fact that they were charging for it even when it was in beta…seemed a bit dicey. But maybe now that its out I’ll spring for it.
I use UltraEdit. It also has a simple project manager and is pretty fully featured otherwise.
For a free alternative, I’d take a look at Crimson editor. It hasn’t been actively developed for a while, but I believe a team’s starting up development of a branch of it.
I’ve had to switch to Windows as a development platform for my new job and I was introduced to Notepad++ and JEdit. I have to say that I really miss good ol’ TextMate when having to work with Notepad++. Unfortunately I’m also working with old school ASP, so even if I brought my laptop and used TextMate, there’s not that much advantage.
Still, Notepad++ and JEdit seem real quirky since I’ve been spoiled with TextMate.
I discovered e back around March. It goes without saying that I was looking for the Windows equivalent of TextMate, and I thought e did a great job. Of course I would’ve preferred to use TextMate, but my school only had one Mac lab.
The one problem I had with e is that I couldn’t get it to install on a flash drive. It required some DLL files installed in the system folder. I haven’t used the 1.0 release, so I don’t know if that’s changed.
Thanks for the heads-up! I’m always on the lookout for a better text editor.
Awesome. I need to try this :)
Notepad2
I’ve installed E editor this morning and it’s not really good. I get DDE errors when I try open more than one file, it can’t find matching bracket if it’s not indented right, I have to choose syntax by hand… everything I tried is either badly designed or unfinished… good potential though, but It need lot more polishing before it could catch up with any other windows editor.
(I work in Em editor, not because it’s any good, but because I have to do lot of encoding mumbo jumbo when I’m opening someone else’s files and they’re not utf8, and Em is perfect for that)
I have during the last 6 months followed the progress in the E text editor development and find that E has reach a good stable level we very great funtionality for efficient programming. You should try it.
Might have to try that out, I use Notepad2 normally, or sometimes use PuTTY to connect to my (dv) then code using vi directly on the server depending on what I’m doing.
Emacs, for more than 10 years, on windows and any flavor of unix.
gVim is great for most things, but there’s a pretty high learning curve. Notepad++ can expand/hide between tags, I mainly use it for HTML or XML.
Like Ian and Halliday, I use Notepad2. Its pretty useful and light.
i use Vim, SharpDevelop (without vi support), and Visual Studio with ViEmu. Vi’s another editor with a steep learning curve, but once you do you might never go back. i’m faster at it than with anything else; only thing i switch to SharpDevelop or VS for is code completion.
I’ve been watching e since beta, even sent in my $ and registered my beta version. My favorite feature is being able to select multiple text regions and type into all of them simultaneously.
As soon as e gets vi support i’m hooked.
I would say Programmers Notepad is very good.
http://www.pnotepad.org/
CrimsonEditor, or course. I might look into this e, tho. Crimson hasn’t been updated since 2004, which is probably why I like it.
Why bother, when VIM is so good and available for most platforms out there and completely free. Nothing beats VIM so learn it once and enjoy it for the rest of your life. It’s a worthwhile investment.
I use a combination of Notepad2 and emacs. Notepad2 is used primarily for opening up documents to scan over quickly. If I want to get any real work done I switch over to emacs.
I do the same basic concept when working on my Mac; I use textmate to do any basic changes and then switch over to emacs if I really need to do real work.
I’ve been testing Komodo Edit by Active State and I like it pretty well. It’s very full featured and on version 4. Autocomplete, folding, project manager, Free, Linux, OSX, Windows, etc. I’ve also tried PSpad and Komodo Edit is way more polished. Komodo Edit has a big brother IDE which does a lot more stuff, but it’s not free.
I also recommend Komodo - either the free Edit version or the IDE with its multilanguage debuggers and other tools. In addition to the features Tim mentioned, it has realtime syntax checking for many languages. I hardly ever make a JavaScript or Ruby syntax error any more - Komodo’s red squiggly underlines tell me what to fix!
jEdit was too sloppy and slow for me, and it used up ram almost as bad as Firefox; it’s main strength was the plugins. Last time I tried it, some of them haven’t been updated in a while. I’ve used Notepad++ for years now, but mostly as just a general text editor/viewer. It’ll view anything, and I like the macros, which are useful for closing turning a list into links. I recently read a coding standards article, that says to use 4 spaces instead of a tab, and sure enough, Notepad++ has an option that will convert tabs for you. I would rather have a list of files than window tabs though, or both. If I’m doing anything too complex for notepad++, then I use a specialized IDE, such as Zend for PHP, Aptana for CSS and JS, etc. I know it’s blasphemy to say nice things about Microsoft, but I find their Expressions: Web thingy pretty good at making a CSS layout.
I’ll give e a try. At this time, I can’t imagine paying for a text editor, but I guess we’ll see. I do wish they thought of a better name though. Let’s all google the letter “e”…
P.S. I like turtles.