blog | CreateSean Web Design

E-texteditor vs Notepad++

Thursday October 15 2009

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.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Oct 15, 2009 at 04:14 PM
code | Expression Engine | General |

| tags: expressionengine, code, editor, |

ExpressionEngine 2.0 Beta

Monday July 13 2009

I woke up this morning to an email inviting me to join in the ExpressionEngine 2.0 beta. This is truly a great way to start the week and I’m incredibly stoked. Unfortunately due to the NDA I cannot say more—though I will report more as soon as I am able to.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Monday Jul 13, 2009 at 11:34 AM
Expression Engine |

| tags: expressionengine, expressionengine 2.0, beta, |

Developing EE Sites on Windows

Thursday June 04 2009

I wrote an article for EE_Insider titled Developing EE Sites on Windows. In the article I discuss the programs I use in my development process including Xampp, Notepad++, WebDrive, IE Tester, IE web developer toolbar, IE debug bar, and Firebug. If you like the article leave a comment.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Jun 4, 2009 at 09:45 AM
Expression Engine |

| tags: expressionengine, article, eeinsider, workflow, |

ExpressionEngine Tips

Saturday May 30 2009

Ryan over at EEinsider has started a new feature where users can submit various EEinsider tips to share with the community.

Ryan has launched this new section on his site with a contest:

Over the next two weeks, I’m going to award a free EE Code T-shirt to five different people who contribute tips. In order to qualify you have to add at least 3 tips and one of those has to be deemed (by me) to be excellent and helpful. Winners will be notified by email.

I’ve already submitted four tips: Dynamic="off", EE Code in CSS stylesheet, Add Tabs for better development, and Save Templates to Files. I’ll be adding more as I think of them and have also subscribed to the tips RSS feed as I’m sure I’ll learn something from these tips.

Go on and share your own tips.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday May 30, 2009 at 03:08 PM
Expression Engine |

| tags: expressionengine, tips, |

ExpressionEngine Professionals Network

Saturday March 21 2009

CreateSean has just been accepted into the ExpressionEngine Professionals network. I am of course very excited and proud to be a member. I’ve added a new badge in the footer of this site as well as in my forum signature on the ExpressionEngine forums. These are quick jobs and I’ll probably change them in the next few days.

The footer badge:
pro network badge