Solid Text Editors for Programming on Windows

Hello all,

I am new to the community, and I just wanted to first of all say how great Channel 9 is.  My question is that I am a heavy OS X programmer, and I feel lost with out an equivalent to BBEdit (http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/index.shtml) on Windows.  Is there something equivalent or better on Windows?  I am getting into some .Net development, and I just need a text editor to understand it.  I can't have Visual Studio do things until I understand what Visual Studio is doing.

Sincerely,

Jerome

There are tons of editors, but if you're planning to use VisualStudio, imho the best way to learn what it's doing is just:

- Use it
- Tweak it: modify options and see what they do
- Switch between designmode and codeview all the time and see how they relate

It's a misconception that in VS you'll only see the visual elements of the program you're creating. You can just as well read, write and analyze the source and/or HTML code.

The only editors I use are VS and Notepad, I don't require anything else.

Hi XeusX

studio is cool, but if i just want a text editor this is my personal favorite

http://www.textpad.com/

A few suggestions:

• Notepad2 - http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html
• Programmers Notepad - http://www.pnotepad.org/
• SciTE - http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
• Syn Text Editor - http://syn.sourceforge.net/
  

Notepad2 is a great little text editor.  I was using Metapad before but I think Notepad2 is going to be my new "default" text editor.

XeusX wrote:

Hello all,

I am new to the community, and I just wanted to first of all say how great Channel 9 is.  My question is that I am a heavy OS X programmer, and I feel lost with out an equivalent to BBEdit (http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/index.shtml) on Windows.  Is there something equivalent or better on Windows?  I am getting into some .Net development, and I just need a text editor to understand it.  I can't have Visual Studio do things until I understand what Visual Studio is doing.

Sincerely,

Jerome

I have always used editplus.

http://editplus.com/

Chalk up another vote for TextPad

I have 3:
Visual Studio .NET for larger projects (SQL & C#)
TextPad for simpler projects (ASP & ASPX)
notepad for even simpler stuff (javascript, CSS, bat, wsh, etc)

I'm an Ultraedit kinda guy.

/Lars.

I'll second that Ultraedit nomination

I like microsoft notepad a lot. Coz it is free and comes with Windows.

But if notepad can add on this features:
- lines numbers
- when i press tab key, will only give 3 whitespaces rather than 6. Hope it can be exactly like VS.NET tab key.
- Intellisense (for coding tags - not really necessary)

I still think Vim is one of the best editors available, it's full of functionality, easily customisable, aimed at developers, well documented, what more can you ask for?

chuawenching wrote:

I like microsoft notepad a lot. Coz it is free and comes with Windows.

But if notepad can add on this features

Also, try out Crimson Editor - nice color coding and support for several file formats (extendable and configurable) including C+, C#, VB, VBScript, SQL, INI, BAT, XML, XML Schema. Freeware.

DagH

Windows XP version of Notepad has line numbers!
The best thing... you can copy-paste it from XP to 2k and it works...

J

Any editors that are more geared towards HTML? Apart from HTML-Kit.
One that has syntax highlighting and a 'tag tree' for easy navigation through HTML code.

Even better one that also has an extensible interface.

JEdit is also a good editor - but needs Java installed (so can't really take it around on a USB flash drive)

My personal favorite is Visual SlickEdit.  More info is available at:  http://www.slickedit.com.