Notepad++: The Free Editor
It may surprise you to hear that many seasoned web developers don’t use full blown programs such as Dreamweaver. Not that these applications are bad, but they are, well, big. In the end we just wish to create our HTML, our PHP code, our Javascript code and, since we are experienced developers, we know how to write code. What we want is a light weight development tool that doesn’t tell us what to do. We want to edit our code quickly and easily.
I’m especially fond of Notepadd++. There are so many reasons, but I’ll bore you with just a few of them:
- It starts up in no-time, even if you have an older computer,
- A simple interface, which you can add and remove components from as needed,
- Syntax highlighting for more programming languages than you can program in, including: HTML, Javascript, CSS, Java, PHP, ASP, C#, Actionscript and many, many more,
- Code completion,
- It’s completely free!
While you can’t beat programs like Eclipse for large projects in Java or PHP for object oriented programming, there’s nothing like Notepad++ for quickly editing your files. It’s definitely my editor of choice.