I’m working on a project for work that requires me to host some files on a remote server so that they can be accessed by a payment processing system. It’s becoming a pain to edit the files locally and upload them every time I make a change, so I went looking for a new editor that supports transparent editing via FTP.
I’ve been a dedicated user of TextPad for a long time, but little nagging things have started to annoy me. While other lightweight editors are adding nice modern features, Textpad seems to be lingering in the past. The two things that I like best about Textpad - why I use that at all - are that it loads very quickly and that it doesn’t have a flashy UI.
An example of a great program that doesn’t meet these needs is Dreamweaver. Now, I’ve recommended Dreamweaver to many people and said many things about how wonderful it is. Truly, Dreamweaver is a great program, but it’s very heavy. It takes up not just a lot of drive space but a lot of memory. It takes too long to load. The UI is full of extra junk that is slow to disappear when I click the “go away” buttons. Using FTP is often a pain in the butt, since you must have a non-transparent local copy. Functionally, it’s perfect, but it’s just too slow for something I’m going to want to use at the speed of thought.
I downloaded Crimson today to give it a go. It has FTP capabilities that are really transparent. Although it does download a local copy, it puts it into a temporary directory automatically, so you don’t have to manage it like dreamweaver. Its syntax highlighting is somewhat improved over TextPad, since TextPad has a tendency to get confused in fairly complicated projects. It also loads fairly quickly, which isn’t surprising given that the executable is only 600kb.
I’m still waiting for the vaporware-ish MiloMemo, which should have all of the features that I need, since I have abused its author into including most of them.
I think that the editor of my dreams would (bold items are things I do with TextPad regularly):
- Support transparent FTP
- Have a tabbed MDI interface with Firefox-like middle-button functionality (close a docment by clicking on its tab, create a blank document by clicking on a blank spot)
- Livespell with an option to turn off spell checking inside and between certain tags, like script or head
- Case changing functions
- Regular expression search and replace
- Regular expression find in files with line-by-line results in a separate pane for easy navigation
- Highly configurable syntax highlighting so I can highlight javascript and PHP inside of HTML without flipping any switches
- Programmable macros via javascript of vbscript
- A file browser pane that lists all of the files that are currently open
- A visual project manager that manages files in a project and can syncronize them via FTP
- CVS capabilities in its own pane
- Patch/diff file generation
- Visual side-by-side diff
- HTML and PHP (and maybe more) tag and function argument hints, perhaps based on public DTDs or schemas
- Block editing
- Line sorting
- Line-based bookmarks
- Named code snippets for inserting HTML entities by name - for example, allowing me to click on "®" to insert "®"
- Line numbers
- User configurable tools like compilers and HTML Tidy
- Fully configurable tab settings (I like 1 tab=2 spaces, tabs are saved as tabs, and indents hang on prior tab count not on where the last word is)
Anybody have a favorite editor? Does it do all that and load in under 2 seconds?
