Comments on: E, Powerful Windows Text Editor, Now Out of Beta

By: scott

scott — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 03:00:13 +0000

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.

By: Michael Geary

Michael Geary — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 07:40:08 +0000

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!

By: Tim Van Buren

Tim Van Buren — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 06:05:26 +0000

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.

By: Zac Garrett

Zac Garrett — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 18:14:16 +0000

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.

By: Mario Grgic

Mario Grgic — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 03:00:48 +0000

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.

By: Don Wilson

Don Wilson — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 02:33:47 +0000

CrimsonEditor, or course. I might look into this e, tho. Crimson hasn’t been updated since 2004, which is probably why I like it.

By: ma

ma — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 15:16:20 +0000

I would say Programmers Notepad is very good.
http://www.pnotepad.org/

By: david alpert

david alpert — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 06:27:07 +0000

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.

By: Jonathan Solichin

Jonathan Solichin — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 04:51:34 +0000

Like Ian and Halliday, I use Notepad2. Its pretty useful and light.

By: michael

michael — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 19:44:32 +0000

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.

By: Dave Null

Dave Null — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 14:15:47 +0000

Emacs, for more than 10 years, on windows and any flavor of unix.

By: Ian Halliday

Ian Halliday — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 22:39:31 +0000

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.

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 21:25:02 +0000

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.

By: Jack

Jack — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 06:53:16 +0000

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)

By: guido_cc

guido_cc — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 05:59:23 +0000

Notepad2

By: Oompa

Oompa — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 01:57:55 +0000

Awesome. I need to try this :)

By: Chris Meisenzahl

Chris Meisenzahl — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 01:16:05 +0000

Thanks for the heads-up! I’m always on the lookout for a better text editor.

By: Brad Bergeron

Brad Bergeron — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 01:03:48 +0000

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.

By: Sam Lu

Sam Lu — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 00:56:43 +0000

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.

By: charlie

charlie — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 00:54:39 +0000

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.

By: Pete Smith

Pete Smith — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 00:18:00 +0000

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.

By: Blake Brannon

Blake Brannon — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 23:38:12 +0000

Paul,

There is a typo on the second to last sentence. “What do you”.
Personally, I use Notepad. Sometimes Jcreator.

By: engtech @ IDT

engtech @ IDT — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 23:07:34 +0000

I use emacs.

Learning curve is a bitch, but it does *everything*.