To develop applications you need a good text editor. You don’t want to use Word for this, and not even in HTML mode– you will get all kinds of weird Microsoft inventions for style. You also don’t want to use Notepad, though you could do that. You should at a minimum usea text editor that allows you to highlight the syntax of your HTML or php code. Here are some open source recommendations and a couple of others.
I’d love comments and suggestions for good little text editors for use with our software.
Wikipedia has this entry for some freeware editors for various platforms.
OPEN SOURCE
Notepad++ is an open source editor that uses syntax highlighting to show you if you are entering statements in sql or html properly. It’s much better than Notepad, and configurable. It works only for Windows, not a Mac, as far as I know. It does not require any registry modifications. You just extract the collection of files and run the program file. It seems to me to be very user friendly and seems to work well.
Nvu is an open source WYSIWYG editor for HTML that also allows you to include php code in your pages. You can publish to your server right from the editor.
NetBeans is a multipurpose IDE for php and java and other languages. It needs the Java Development Kit which is also free, but takes space.
tsWebEditor is an open source editor with a lot of potential. I only recently discovered it, but have tried it and I believe it is quite satisfactory.
NOT OPEN SOURCE
TextPad is a configurable text editor preferred by pros. It costs money but is extremely versatile. See me for information about it or a demo.
