Singing the Praises of Crimson Editor
I’d like to take a break from tonight’s back-end construction work to plug Crimson Editor, a free programmer’s text editor with some exceptional features. I’ve been using it to tweak my templates and CSS during the move from Movable Type to WordPress, and I’m very impressed.
CE has excellent syntax highlighting for many kinds of code (including PHP, XHTML, CSS, JSP, ASP, and more), a tabbed multiple-document interface, search across multiple documents, find-and-replace with regular expression support, spell-checking, unlimited undo/redo, macro recording, configurable pretty-printing, smart line- and block-level indenting, remote file editing via FTP, and basic project management features.
I haven’t even touched bottom on its feature set in the few days I’ve been using it, so I’m sure I’ll find even more to love. And it’s fast.
No, I’m not being paid for this. Yes, you should immediately go check it out for yourself. My transition from Movable Type to WordPress — and the subsequent tweaking and PHP hacking I’ve done to get things “just right” — would’ve been a hell of a lot more painful without this wonderful little program.
Amen! Hooray for Crimson Editor. I work on a PHP/PostgreSQL back end and I find that Crimson Editor is more than up to the task.
Now if I knew how to properly use regexps, I would be made in the shade.
-Derek
Comment by Derek — July 22, 2004 @ 2:03 pm
Derek, if you like Crimson Editor you should consider trying jEdit. It’s a cross-platform, open-source programmer’s editor that has been in continual development for years. It’s now very mature and stable, with a rich feature set. I’ve been using it since I moved to a hosting company that uses SFTP, since Crimson Editor doesn’t support SFTP transfers.
JEdit is written in Java, but runs quite fast. It has a multitude of plugins that can add a bevy of features to the base editor. The FTP/SFTP support is one such plugin. Others include project management, a file system browser, document/code structure browser, tabbed interface for multiple-file editing, HTML Tidy, improved code highlighting, and more.
If you decide to try it, I recommend downloading the 4.2 pre-release version. Most of the good plugins have already been updated to take advantage of its new features, and 4.2’s plugin management and overall extensibility are just a bit better than 4.1. When it reaches its final release, I’ll probably do a review on this site.
Comment by Adam M. — July 23, 2004 @ 10:01 am