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Oct
15
2009
11
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E-texteditor vs Notepad++
I’ve been using notepad++ as my text-editor of choice for several years now and have been relatively satisfied with it. It does everything I want, but I’ve also heard a lot of good things about e-texteditor which has “the power of textmate on windows”. I’m not a fan of Apple products but have heard so many good things about textmate that I thought I should give it a try.
Both notepad++ and etexteditor allow users to import user created bundles. This is great because I make web sites using ExpressionEngine (EE) and having EE tags color coded and shortcutted would be really nice. There is a bundle for notepad++ on this EE forum thread. The problem for me is that it has never really worked the way I expected it to so I don’t use it.
The textmate bundle for EE is available here. When I added this to e-texteditor it worked exactly the way I expected. Autocomplete worked beautifully and even auto selected variables that were likely to be customized. The only thing missing is that the disable is empty leaving one to remember all the options. I suppose I could customize this to my own tastes. In any case it works great.
When I first started using this I was really excited and thinking it was time to drop notepad++ but I soon found that e-texteditor is missing one key feature of notepad++ that I use all the time. That is the ability to have multiple files open side by side in the same instance and move them from one side to the other or clone to the other view. For me this is great as I can edit my CSS file on one side, while my EE html/eetag template is on the other side. Additionally it’s great when making adjustments to one file as you can open it and then clone it to the other side to make your changes while at the same time being able to see the original.
If or when e-texteditor can do that, I’ll make the switch and gladly buy a license, but until then I’m going to stick with notepad++ I know this may not be the most in depth comparison, but it does look at the features that I use and consider important. Comments welcome.
Deron Sizemore said:
I’m a big fan of NotePad++. I tried eTextEditor briefly but found it much slower than NotePad++ especially when initially running the application. I also loved the idea of having EE bundled code wrapped into eTextEditor but in the end just found that it wasn’t as great as it sounded and I ended up doing basically the same thing with another small app running in the background; it’s called “Texter.” You can specify code snippets and also specify what triggers those snippets. All I did was enter all my most used snippets into Texter and now I’m ready to go. Texter also works with email or any other area where you can type text, so I use it for other things like responding to email when I need to use a generic “thank you” message or something.
Also, I didn’t know NotePad++ had the side-by-side ability. Need to check that out.
October 15, 2009 @ 09:59 PM
Eric Barstad said:
Hi Sean,
e TextEditor does have split pane view (vertical or horizontal). You just have to drag the tab into the editor. When you see a light blue rectangle, that shows you how the window will be split (i.e., either vertically or horizontally). I’m not sure why this isn’t in the View menu.
October 15, 2009 @ 11:20 PM
Eric Barstad said:
Wow, this Windows editor looks pretty good, too: http://www.sublimetext.com/
October 16, 2009 @ 06:22 AM
Sean said:
Deron,
I actually wrote about texter back in March and put together an EE texter bundle. But after using it for a few weeks I stopped as it was really buggy and was messing with other programs.
Eric,
Thanks for the pointer about the split view for e-texteditor. However it doesn’t work exactly the way I like. It first splits vertically and then allows you to split horizontally. If you delete the bottom pane the two side by side panes switch to one on top of the other. It’s close but not quite there. Also you’re right that it’s a little strange that it’s not on the menu or right click context menu options.
sublime text looks interesting - is there an EE bundle around? if there is, I would give it a try.
October 16, 2009 @ 05:55 PM
Deron Sizemore said:
Sean,
That’s funny. Amazing how you forget things. That EE thread is what introduced me to Texter.
Completely slipped my mind.
What kind of bugginess where you experiencing? I’ve not noticed anything but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening and I’m just to dumb to notice.
October 16, 2009 @ 09:26 PM
Sean said:
Deron,
That’s happened to me too. Interestingly I was googling something for teaching and the answer was on my own blog - http://eflgeek.com - now that’s unexpected.
The biggest but that bothered me was if I had texter running at the same time as photoshop none of the photoshop hot keys work. Drove me crazy.
I’m sure there were a couple of others, but I can’t remember them right now.
October 16, 2009 @ 09:29 PM
Deron Sizemore said:
That’s weird. I’ve not experienced any PS buggyness like that. My hot keys seem to be fine. I’m on CS4, what are you running? Maybe it’s buggy with earlier versions?
October 16, 2009 @ 09:31 PM
Sean said:
At that time I was using CS3, but I just switched over to CS4 so maybe I’ll give it another shot.
October 16, 2009 @ 09:34 PM
lebisol said:
Sean,
check out webuilder (http://www.blumentals.net/webuilder/).
Great package but def. more fo an IDE and heavier than notepad+.
October 21, 2009 @ 12:31 AM
lebisol said:
or more of bare bones editor: http://intype.info/home/index.php
October 21, 2009 @ 01:10 AM
Sean said:
lebisol,
thanks for the links.
October 21, 2009 @ 12:23 PM