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Heh heh, I used Notepad++ for a long time.

Give Crimson Editor (CEdeit) a try, it's a lot like Notepad++ but it does a few extra things like bracket-matching, keyword highlighting some other handy stuff: http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

I use it in a very 'minimal view' mode, but I like it a lot.

Crimson Editor

Good text editors for Windows are hard to find. I was looking for these features:

# White text on black background
# Syntax highlighting
# Tabs
# Spell checker (preferably a smart one which ignores HTML tags, keywords etc)
# Small and fast
# Hard word wrapping
# Preferably open source / free

CE is the only one I have found so far that meets those requirements. I checked JuffEd (no white on black), Metapad (no syntax highlighting), Notepad++ (spell checker is not realtime), Notetab Free, Programmers File Editor (pretty basic), Programmers Notepad (no spell checker). PSPad, RJ TextEd (good but slow), ConTEXT (no spell checker), gEdit (pretty good, a bit large due to being a Unix port, most plug-ins don't work on Windows), jEdit (Java based, need I say more?) and a few more, but none of the met the requirements.

Miranda IM (instant messaging client)
Hyrdra IRC (IRC client)
Cadsoft EAGLE (schematic and PCB layout)

Don't want bloat? Don't use an IDE.

http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

When I used Windows I liked Crimson Editor and TextEdit.

Falcon

Lua's a great place to start - the syntax isn't too fiddly, and it's versatile enough to handle anything you would want to show them. It's free, and all you need is a text editor. If you get a semi-decent editor (I use Crimson Editor, which is old but does everything I need) you should be able to set it up so that it executes the program on a hotkey.

Having used most of those apps for years, I would say...
- Photoshop 7 is fine. CS and CS2 added features, and CS3 did a UI overhaul but 90% of it is still the same... and you'd have a hard time teaching just 25% of what Photoshop can do in a semester-long class. (Not that CS3 doesn't have great features--the auto-align stuff kicks ass--but a lot of what I do day to day could be done with Photoshop 3.) If you believe "the basics are what's important," then old versions are fine.
- Same for Flash 5. There's lots and lots there. The basic concepts haven't changed much. (Though the scripting language has, AFAIK. I'm not a heavy user of Flash.)
- As for DreamWeaver, I'd say, teach code! You can go far with just a handful of basic HTML tags--p, b, i, br, hr, ul, ol, li, table, tr, th, td, div, span--and if you ever want to go "past" HTML into PHP or something, you'll need to know the code anyway. GUI editors have their place, but I've never seen a beginner make a site with one that didn't look like ass in most browsers. There are lots of good, shiny, feature-full free editors out there, like Crimson Editor which is even OSS.
- Not sure how to replace MovieMaker. :-)
And you can educate them about the programs themselves, not just teaching them how to use the apps. As an example, say "Here's Photoshop 7. Here's the GIMP, which is newer and free. Photoshop costs ~$1000. Here's a video from adobe.com showing some of the new features in Photoshop CS3. Make up your own mind."

I've always been fond of Crimson Editor. Tabs, syntax highlighting, and the ability to run compilers from a menu or shortcut.

Other nice un-bloated Windows utilities I'll add:

V, the file viewer
Foxit Reader for viewing PDFs
Crimson Editor for text files, though I more often use emacs.

You can run it on older machines, but the efficiency is impressive.

http://www.editpadlite.com/
http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

And of course Opera

http://www.opera.no/

Can't go back to Firefox or IE after using this wonder.

And I'm not familiar with any products that are better than FrontPage yet still easy to use for Web design.

Wow. Um, better than FrontPage? I seriously hope that was a slip, and that you meant "DreamWeaver" and aren't trying to teach people web design with FrontPage - anyone who uses FrontPage and claims to be a "professional" anything to do with web design needs to be taken out into the streets and heckled to death.

As for DreamWeaver, while it does provide some nice tools for visualizing what you're doing while you do it, you really don't learn it any faster than if you were typing your data in with a text editor and saving/browser reloading frequently. There are a few good text editors out there that do syntax highlighting, for example Notepad++, and Crimson Editor. Both of which are useful for not only HTML editing, but for many other programming languages, as they change syntax highlighting based on the file extension (for HTML, PHP, Java, C, and so on...)

This: http://www.ebb.org/PickingUpPerl/pickingUpPerl.pdf guide is awesome if you want to learn Perl. Concise and articulate, it manages to explain all the major topics of Perl in 66 pages. I recommend working through the entire guide as quick as possible, don't worry about remembering everything as you can always come back to it later. I also recommend having the O'Reilly camel books (Learning Perl, Programming Perl, Perl Cookbook) handy when going through the guide. You can read the books here: http://www.jimsannex.com/Studies/CD_perl/index.htm but you better go out and buy the real thing, worth every penny!!! If your running Windows you'll need to download Perl and a good editor with syntax highlighting:

http://downloads.activestate.com/ActivePerl/Window s/5.8/ActivePerl-5.8.8.820-MSWin32-x86-274739.msi
http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

After you install perl open a command prompt and run ppm, this is your simple GUI gateway to CPAN packages (make a mental note). After you get a handle on basic perl checkout Perl/Tk (GUI Toolkit for Perl). The Tk packages are included and installed with ActivePerl... Here's your first Perl/TK program:

use Tk;
my $top = new MainWindow;
$top->configure(-title=>"My First Perl GUI Program");
my $lab = $top->Label(-textvariable=>\$labelText);
my $b = $top->Button(-text=>'Click Me!', -command=>sub {$labelText="Congratulations! it worked!" });
$lab->grid(-row=>0, -column=>0);
$b->grid(-row=>1, -column=>0);
MainLoop;

I prefer Crimson Editor myself, even though the author's gone to ground and the project hasn't been updated in awhile. Syntax highlighting for a bunch of languages, plus customizable color/italic/bold combinations for displaying keywords and whatnot.

* Crimson Editor An amazingly powerful freeware text / script editor.

  * uTorrent Is there an open source Torrent Client in under 200k? Does it have RSS searching, bandwidth scheduling, automatic resume, and trackerless support? Yes? Oh, good then.

  * As -U- Type. Spell check anywhere. It's a great piece of software, if you can get over the fact that the author barely speaks any english.

  * 3 Plane Soft Screensavers. Ok, they're screensavers. And they're a rip off. But damn they're nice.

  * Trillian. 'nuff said.

  * The Bat! The second best mail client created, behind only KMail.

  * IZarc If there were need for zip clients anymore, this would be the one to have. Also handles about 50 other file standards, integrates really well with explorer, is small and efficient, and did I mention free? Best unzipper out there, including the pay options.

  * Folder Size Shows you how big your folders are. If explorer were made by Apple, it would do this by default.

  * True Crypt Data so secure even it doesn't know if there is more to be found in a file.

  * Thumbs Plus Arguably there are a lot of good applications in this space, and there are ones out there with better interfaces. But it is the only thumbnail application I've ever used that can handle upwards of 20,000 files in a single directory. If you take lots of pictures, this is the one.

  * DVD Decrypter Recently bought out by Macrovision to shut down it's decryptey goodness, DVD Decrypter is really a no-nonsense, no-fuss DVD ripper and burner. Want to rip a movie from a DVD so you can watch it later? One button. Want to rip it back to a DVD? Another button.

  * Microsoft Power Toys Nifty stuff from people who both hate and make the operating system.

And remember to use an antivirus, a firewall, and two anti-spyware suites. My personal favorites are AVG Antivirus, Kerio Personal Firewall, Spybot, and Ad Aware.

And if you grab Crimson Editor, you'll get a nice free text editor with spell check.

Crimson Editor is nice and free, but not FSF free.

Crimson Editor is an excellent freeware text editor for Windows. http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

I gave up with SciTE and now use the plain and simple Crimson Editor.

Why use editplus when you can use Crimson Editor when its free, open source, and has all the capabilities of edit plus, functionality, and then some? (http://www.crimsoneditor.com/) The built in macro functionality is really sweet too!

Personally, I like Crimson Editor for Windows better. :)

Now why would anyone want to use a "pirated" version of TextPad? I've used it for years and have legally downloaded updates from TextPad.com. with no problem. Maybe every several saves I'll get a nag popup, and eventually I may pay for it, but other than the nag it's perfectly legal to download, install, and use without paying for it. Though I've got MS Word I still use TextPad more. Another good text editor is Crimson Editor. I've got XMLSpy as well in the Home edition which was free, it did require registration but then they email you a key to unlock it.

If you're referring to http://www.crimsoneditor.com/, GNU is not an appropriate word to describe it.

Maybe "non-free" would be better. The non-free Crimson Editor.

If you're not referring to that, please give us a link.

Well, as for C#, would take a look at mono or Portable.Net for some enlightenment... pnet is a bit further for desktop/gui stuff, and mono is further with asp.net for web-application hosting... ymmv.

Also, on the editor, I can't say enough good things about crimson .. I use it for about everything.. I've also been using SharpDevelop which is a FOSS ide, not quite as responsive as MS's 2003 VS, but pretty nice..

In fact doing a presentation on NON-Microsoft.Net for my .Net usergroup in a couple weeks... There have been several books published on mono, pnet, #develop and more.. with a few on the way. For desktop applications, it can be pretty nice (check out wx.Net a .net wrapper for the cross platform wxWidgets toolkit... works on win/lin/osx.

I have to say that the MS tools are about the best of their breed, eclips is pretty nice, and I like more of a plain text editor (with syntax highlighting, and programming options) like crimson. Textpad is nice, imho, crimson is better.

I used these free editors very often for coding languages ranging from C++ to Tcl/Tk: Crimson Editor and ConText.

ZipGenius (http://www.zipgenius.it/) - If you've used WinZip then this is the best freeware to compare with it.
XnView (http://www.xnview.com/) - prefer this to Irfanview as a graphics editor.
Ethereal (http://www.ethereal.com/) - network sniffer.
Calc98 (http://www.calculator.org/download.html) - better calculator than the default Windows' version.
CDBurnerXP (http://www.cdburnerxp.se/) - Full featured freeware CD burning software package.
Crimson Editor (http://www.crimsoneditor.com/) - ultimate notepad replacement.
Max's HTML Beauty (http://www.htmlbeauty.com/) - full featured HTML editor.

And of course nonags.com is one of the first places I check for these kinds of things.

I use:

UltimateZip http://www.ultimatezip.com/ for file compression

Crimson Editor http://www.crimsoneditor.com/ for editing code
BadBlue http://www.badblue.com/ for local webserving

LeechFTP http://stud.fh-heilbronn.de/~jdebis/leechftp/downl oads.html (no longer under development, but I like it)

Crimson

Many mass-market users don't really know about the wonderful software available online. If they don't see it on the shelves of Best Buy and CompUSA, it doesn't exist in their reality.

Somewhat related example - I was working on a database extract with someone today. He was trying to count columns and ensure the fields were lining up in this ASCII extract file - in *NOTEPAD*. He called me up because he was having so much trouble - apparently Notepad breaks lines at 1024 characters, whether you've got word wrap on or not. Since this format is 1670 characters / line, he was having serious trouble trying to figure out if things were lining up.

The first thing I told him to do was download Crimson Editor, a great freeware text editor (one of many), and his job all of a sudden got an order of magnitude easier!

He's an intelligent guy, knows his stuff (moreso than your average grandmother), but just didn't realize the plethora of tools available online, for absolutely free. There's a lot of people like that.

I use crimson for all my editing, .net/asp.net (C#, vb, jscript), c#/standalone, html, php, sql, javascript, you name it.. works great.

However, having seen a preview of the 2005 a few weeks ago, it's *REALLY* compelling to leave a lot of hand-coding behind...

Got syntax files for almost any language, and they're easy to create if your pet language is missing.

Dunno, I am fond of using crimson and using batch files for compiling/moving to test location.. there is also nant.

Oh, I'm very sorry, I did misunderstand you! I must apologize for my my rudeness, especially that last bit. I didn't mean to snap, I think it may have been early in the morning or something :0)

I think I know the people who you were talking about! I have to use windows sometimes, mostly for games, so I use Emacs for windows or another neat editor called crimson editor , which provides syntax highlighting, tabbed interface and other nice things.

Sorry again for the misunderstanding!

actually looks a lot like my list, however I use MS-Office 2k, and don't go too far without installing crimson


trillian is also near the top.

Second, my list. Almost all of my favorite programs are already mentioned in the +5 posts, so I won't list them all (there are a lot). Here's what's left of my top 25 or so programs I definitely install on a fresh Windows reinstall, in no particular order. Everything is free, unless otherwise noted. I don't think any of these are open-sourced, though.

• ObjectDock - OS X's sexy toolbar that expands when you mouseover is now available for windows, too. Tons of useful plugins available, such as a weather tracker and system monitor.
  
• Yz's dock - no link for this one because Apple killed it with a C&D letter. Same basic concept as ObjectDock; marginally better IMHO. If you really want it, google for yz_dck0083.zip.
  
• StyleXP - I can't believe no one's mentioned this one yet. Windows skinning, anyone?
  
• Crimson Editor - yet another lightweight (i.e., fast) file editor with extended functionality such as automatically coloring source code files.
  
• MetaPad - extremely lightweight file editor, a replacement for notepad.exe.
  
• Sothink SWF Decompiler - good for when I want to grab an image or sound out of a flash file.
  
• Google Toolbar - yes, it's created by Google, the next Big Brother, but I like the pop-up blocker, and the privacy issues are moot if you take the time to uncheck one box.
  
• Middle Man - for people like me who still use AOL's bread-and-butter AIM client, this is a great unofficial plug-in. Removes ads and adds a ton of new functionality.
  
• Peer Guardian - another biggie that I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned before. Blocks the RIAA and its ilk from connecting to your machine.
• Total Recorder - (shareware/demo) captures all audio output and logs it to a wav or mp3 file. Good for stream ripping.
  
• NetLimiter - (shareware/demo) limit your maximum upload/download speeds, optionally on a program by program basis. Some firewalls already have this functionality, though... but not all.
  

If anyone has suggestions for alternatives, im open. But they have to be good! Im currently looking for a new .net IDE as sharpdevelop has a few bugs, and since its written in c#, i cant help fix em :(

Well.. if you're willing to spend the time to configure things up, Crimson Editor is tops in my book.

OpenOffice
Crimson Editor (programmer's editor; free, not open source)
Audacity (WAV editor)
CDex (ripper)
Firefox
Thunderbird
Navicat (MySQL admin tool)
MySQL Snap (MySQL backup tool)
Top Style (CSS Editor)
Photoshop (Gimp ain't ready for primetime yet. Sorry.)

That's 10. Next up: WinAmp, WS-FTP, AdAware, and 17 million IE/Win patches.

Besides what was stated in the news story, and what is grabbed on Windows Update...

Miranda
Lightweight ICQ/IM app with plugin support for IRC/Jabber/etc..

FilZip
Free zip, rar, etc... util

PuTTY
Best SSH client for windows, and it's free

WinSCP
SFTP/SCP Client, free

Crimson Editor
Text Editor / IDE, supports color-coding source code and such. Very handy.

Mozilla
FireFox is nice, but I need a decent mail app and I like Moz for that.

Media Player Classic
Best. App. Ever. As long as you've got the codec installed, this handy thing will play the media files for you. This includes QuickTime, RealPlayer, and even Flash movies.

Nimo Codec Pack
A compilation of video and audio codecs as well as stream switchers, extra directshow filters, and nifty bits. Rather than hunting down individual codecs for XviD, 3vix, OGG, etc... this pack does it all in one operation.

WinEDT is 30$ shareware for students. A good freeware editor for windows users is Crimson Editor. It has a built in function for highlihting commands in LaTeX documents, and many other types of code.

I used Dreamweaver for a long time, as it was convenient and relatively easy (and the library and template features were nice).

Unfortunately, the problem is that, as others have noted here, using such corporate comforts protects you from doing things the right way.

I think what you should be thinking about is a content management system, wherein your content is easily editable (live and online) and the system makes you work with templates in the right way (i.e., using CSS). For my current job, I wound up rolling my own CMS, using PHP for the front end and to generate HTML, and MySQL to keep track of templates. For a live content editor, I'm using Ephox, which is a great product but costs a pretty penny. I started out with Spaw, but it doesn't generate XHTML and can only be used in IE.

There are a ton of CMSs out there -- I just found that most of them were overkill for my website. (And the open source ones generally use IE-centric products for live content editing.) Just go to sourceforge and search for "CMS". Mambo is one of the better ones I've seen.

Oh, and I second the nomination of Crimson Editor as a good programmer's text editor. (Free, as in beer.) For CSS, I use Top Style (not free, but excellent).

I'm not sure exactly what Dreamweaver library files are (you might want to explain that in your article next time, hint hint), but I'm assuming they are used to make templates and dynamic content. In that case, do not use proprietary tools; use either SSI or a scripting language (go PHP!).

Here are the tools I use for web design:

Source editing: Crimson Editor, a freely available text editor that supports syntax coloring and just about anything you'd ever want in a text editor. Somewhat well-designed GUI and very small (fits on a floppy).

PHP editing: Crimson Editor (listed above), and Zend for larger projects

Page design: Photoshop/Imageready and (for more content-oriented pages) Illustrator

HTML Editing: Adobe Golive CS. I know I'm sounding like an Adobe fanboy here, but GoLive really kicks ass. It has a steep learning curve, in that it's slightly harder to pick up than Dreamweaver, but after spending a few hours with it, you'll love it. Free trial available, I believe.

Of course, this is all proprietary software, and that's how things are in the design world. With development, you have a little freedom, but with design, you're locked into the Big Four (Adobe/Macromedia/Corel/Quark) and the last two are on its last legs.

This is not meant to be a troll, but IMHO Outlook and Exchange in particular, are monstrosities... however, I run win2k (ran xp pro for a while)

I happen to like windows, for the most part, I tend to rip out just about everything that is in here, and use firefox for my browser, and thunderbird for email.. runs great... on the media side, I *do* use WMP, it runs fine, didn't do so great on an older system, but it runs fine.. most of my time is spent in a text editor, I use crimson which seriously rocks... I also rely on batch files, and .vbs files for maintainance tasks, as I am usually going from one machine to another.. about the only other software I rely heavily on is UltraVNC... it works for what I need.. :)

Now, I absolutely hate MS's licensing structure, and the "activation" crap in newer versions.. I run win2k, and office2k.. and if OOo were actually written to install with en-US measurements, and friendlier settings, would probably switch to that... but it is klunky to me, but making progress.. :) Also, dispite the code-red and variants, IIS is one of the nicest web servers I've ever worked with, and I've worked with more than a few... I like ASP.Net (mono is getting there), and I like a few windows programs that I haven't found as good, or easy of an equivalent for *nix.

Maybe in a few more years, my main desktop will change... I like what Novell is investing efforts towards with Suse, and Ximian... so, that will probably be my platform of choise when the time comes... each year I try out a few different distros for about a week each.. and each year it gets better.. last time was almost a year ago, and wasn't quite there yet.. maybe in a few weeks when I try again, it will work out. :)

> What Windows IDE will do syntax highlighting for Python
> How about PERL?
> or PHP?
> or Ruby?
> or any of the other numerous languages that are not only supported, but are afforded real,
> working tools natively supported by the environment.

Not an IDE, but supports syntax highlighting, and is a great editor for windows, in general, I use it for pretty much any text based editing... crimson editor

my favorite editor is crimson editor:
http://www.crimsoneditor.com/
it supports remote files (ftp) i wish it had native ssh file transfer!
unfortunatly only available for windows.. but since work really only uses windows for workstations, it is ok.. if crimson was available unders linux i would definitly think about switching...

Crimson Editor is a great, free editor when sitting at a windows box.

I don't mean to shill for the guy, but I'm going to anyway cause I really like this program. And, No. I don't work for him or know him or anything.

From his homepage...

Crimson Editor is a professional source editor for Windows.

This program is not only fast in loading time, but also small in size (so small that it can be copied in one floppy disk).

While it can serve as a good replacement for Notepad, it also offers many powerful features for programming languages such as HTML, C/C++, Perl and Java.

Syntax Highlighting for HTML, C/C++, Perl, Java, Matlab and LaTeX. Also, it can be extended for other programming languages based on custom syntax files.

Other features include undo/redo, user tools, macros, spell checker and more.

Crimson Editor is my favorite freeware editor. If only it came with source I would port it to linux.

If you're on windows check it out: www.crimsoneditor.com

It's simple and fast but also makes a great programmer's editor with syntax highlighting, block selection, etc. Did I mention that it's free?

This may be a little off topic, but I thought it'd be a good time to ask: Can anyone recommend a good free/Free editor for HTML? I'm not looking for a WYSIWYG editor -- just something that allows me to hand-code more easily (with syntax highlighting and the like).

My current favorite is probably Crimson Editor. Its big features include syntax highlighting (of course), a tabbed interface, and change detection (it notifies the user if someone else has changed the file on-disk).

Any others I should look into? I've heard the suggestions for jEdit, but it doesn't seem to have a tabbed interface (at least not that I could manage to activate). HTML Kit is another one that always comes up, but I don't believe it has change-detection :-/.

Notepad and vi are the only true HTML editors.

If you're still using Notepad to edit your HTML on a regular basis, you're either stupid or an idiot.

There's many free applications that are KICK-ASS for editing HTML and other files. Crimson Editor comes to mind.

I mean, c'mon, Notepad? It doesn't even show you line numbers...

Crimson Editor color-codes HTML, too. It doesn't do that other stuff, but it's quite a bit cheaper.

Of course, I'm not really the type to edit HTML in a text editor much, either. Lately, I've been relying on Visual Studio .NET (I'm sure I'll get modded down for saying that) for my editing, since it does color-coding, automatic end-tab completion, automatic spacing, grouping of different pages in the same project space, and so I can see the webpage in progress.

Unfortunately, it's made me very lazy with my HTMLing. With all the stuff it does for me, I'm not to confident in my ability to write neat and good HTML without it's help. But it does make my work go a lot faster...

Kidding aside, I'm curious about text editors for win32. Sure, there are quite a few (CrimsonEditor is my current favorite, with Source Edit close behind) but, like any good geek, I'm looking for The Best ;).

Ports of Emacs or Vi[m] to win32 don't interest me very much, primarily because I enjoy the hotkey conventions that I'm used to already in win32 (Ctrl-C to copy, Ctrl-X to cut, and so on). Really, I'm looking for one with syntax highlighting for languages such as HTML and CSS, and a tabbed-interface. Are there any Super Great editors that I should check out?

Well there's a great list of editors on PHP.net at http://213.155.159.67/phpeditors/index.php that you might find helpful. The list gives the webpage, platform, license, and reader comments for each one.

As a web developer who is almost always using Windows, lately I've used Homesite (costs a bunch), 1st Page 2000 (just like Homesite but free) and Crimson Editor. They all work fine for anything I've needed to do.

dude, put yourself out of misery and use a real text editor like Crimson Edit . Microsoft laughs at you every time you use notepad. And yes it's free :)