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• EditPlus Programming editor
• IrfanView Image viewer with effects and image manipulation capabilities
• Putty so I can SSH to my Gentoo from winblows
• Ability Spreadsheet as opposed to the spreadsheets in microsoft office, open office, and gnumeric
• Proxomitron Web-filtering proxy
• Flashpaste Copy/Paste on steroids
• WinRAR as opposed to winzip
• uTorrent as opposed to azureus and other java based boulder-weight crap
• mIRC IRC client
• DVD Shrink Rip/decode/encode DVDs, etc.
• Tail for Win32 Wish tail under linux was this good
• RealAlternative as opposed to realplayer
• Virtual Dimension Virtual desktops, as opposed to microsoft's power toys

I am not sure if our tastes differ that much - I personally like using the shell, you'll be hard pressed to find my machine up and running with less than three shells open, one on vi(m) and one building and the other grepping. On the other hand I won't ever claim to be a vi or gdb guru - I'm still learning them as I go (though, who isn't?).

I find that gui's that mess with your project structure or force you into rigid workspaces (eclipse for example) with interesting rules of where you can and can't place code quite annoying. It would be nice to be able to just have a GUI that would integrate my own proper custom rules. On windows one of my favourite editing tools was always a simple editor (style editplus, not free but useful with excellent options for integrating custom tools.

I may be dreaming that there is a GUI out there that can just integrate with my current shell development and do what a graphical IDE is meant to do - make development easier without forcing the developer into bad practices and loss of knoweldge (as you mentioned).

Anyone know of an editor that has this?

If you want that from an IDE, eclipse does that, and pretty robustly at that. I wouldn't want to miss it.

For more simple editors for a quick text edit, my favorite is EditPlus. It lets you choose between classical tabs and whitespace tabs, as how long (in characters) a tab in either mode should be treated, it has the auto-indent you mentioned, reacting to freely definable characters (for example, auto-indent forward after '{' or '(', and back after '}' or ')', respectively). Best of all, it lets you define these parameters independently for plain text, c/c++, java, HTML, Perl, etc., etc., as well as any number of custom syntaxes you may wish to import or define yourself. A small selection of useful features of a great tool. Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Editplus or the company behind it, just a happy user.

• putty + pageant
• total commander
• editplus
• utorrent
• klipfolio

What I basically do is paste the document into EditPlus, then I use a function called "Replace" to get rid of the big stuff and edit out the rest of the tags manually. It may not be the best solution, but it's visually easier than just using notepad.

. . . once you have pirated and installed it, there is no incentive to ever pay for it.

So why did I recently send thirty bucks to some guy in Korea for EditPlus? EditPlus is fully functional shareware. I could have kept on using it forever without paying a penny.

To answer my own question, because the author did right by me, so it's only fair that I do right by him and pay up. It's called honor.

Amen to the comments on EditPlus! Great damn program for the money.

I have more than 10 in my "start from scratch" install, so here goes:

• Acrobat 5
• AdAware 6
• EditPlus (the best damn win32 text editor.)
• Macromedia Fireworks
• Microsoft Remote Desktop (damn good Terminal for Win32)
• Microsoft Office (counting it as one program)
• Nero
• Offline Explorer Pro
• Putty (god bless Simon Tatham!)
• Screen Calipers
• Trillian
• TweakUI
• VirusScan Enterprise
• WinAmp
• WinZip

I'm going to have to check out FileZilla... I've used CuteFTP, LeechFTP, and some others... I've never found one I'm completely happy with. PDF Creator and SpyBot SS look like good programs to have too... thx for the links!

Cygwin usually goes on a machine after a while, but it's an "install as needed" item. I've decided to use RealAlternative instead of installing RealPlayer for the rare occasions I need to view a RAM stream.

• Putty - A free (GPL) SSH terminal emulator
• Winzip - Yeah, you know what this is
• VLC - Free media player
• OpenOffice.org - I should stop doing these descriptions, its not as if youve heard of these things before!
• GIMP for windows - Yup, the infernal/eternal image editor
• Sharpdevelop - Free (GPL) .net IDE, requires the .net framework and SDK
• Bloodshed Dev-C++ - Excellent free (GPL) C and C++ IDE, using the Windows GCC port
• Thunderbird - Mail client
• Firefox - Web browser
• Adobe Acrobat Reader - PDF Reader
• PDFcreator - GPL PDF print driver for windows
• MessengerPro (Clickatell) - Non free SMS sender for windows, company does good bulk buy sms rates, i buy 500 at a time for less than $5
• Lavasoft Adaware and Spybot SS - For the essentials in life
• Topstyle - Free version of the excellent CSS editor for webdevelopment, if anyone knows a good free alternative, im open to suggestions :)
• SmartFTP - Great free for personal use FTP client, not found a better one yet! (I have, Filezilla it is excellent AND fully GPL, none of this non free shit, bub. :-) )
• MySQL-Front - Old version of the MySQL windows front end, much much better than the new one you pay for. Source isnt open and the old developer discontinued development, possibly one of the best advertisements for why OSS is good :(
• Editplus - Possibly the best editor ive found, not free im afraid, costs around $25

VLC -, like you mentioned, Free media player is a great media player, it blew me away. Better then Window's media player, and I know that my porno viewing habits are not going straight to Bill Gates.

One you didn't mention is Filezilla which is a good GPL ftp program instead of SmartFTP if you want to try another one out. (I must confess I use LeechFTP since I haven't gotten use to Filezilla just yet, although if you are into hosting files Filezilla is even better).

I know the initial question was for family users, but Editplus is a fantastic text editor.
Syntax highlighting, formatting, auto completion, etc.
Syntax files can be downloaded for pretty much anything you are gonna want to code in it, or you can write your own custom syntax files.
Plenty of user definable functions, and an output window for any functions that need them (ie. Java compiler, etc)

It's not free though.
Stev.

EditPlus is a great text editor for Windows (or Xfree86 using Wine). I prefer it to UltraEdit any day of the week.

I've used EditPlus for a number of years now. It is without a doubt the best text editor on Windows for my needs (though it's not a match for BBEdit on the Mac of course).

It has a few flaws, but for most things it works very well. I use it primarily for coding (Java, Python, etc). Syntax colouring is excellent, external tools are very easy to integrate (within limits - this is one of the areas I'd prefer more work in, but it's still good).

It comes with syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP, Perl, C/C++, Java, JavaScript and VBScript, plus you can get user-created "STX" files for many other languages, or write your own. Each token color can be easily configured from a pallete selection dialog.

My favorite feature though is the built in FTP (File Open/Save/Save As) system, which makes opening a file on a remote FTP server as seamless as opening a file on your local machine.

Here's a few other features which I felt seemed noteworthy:

• Regular-expression like search and replace (across one or all open documents)
• Group files into "projects", which are saved in the config and easily accessible by a "Project" menu at any time.
• Keyboard macro recording/playback/save ability
• ASCII chart reference
• Document templates
• User-configurable tools
• On-screen document selector tabs (for quicking jumping between open documents)
• Can make whitespace chars visible
• Fullscreen mode
• Spellchecker
• IE integration for quick previews
• Box select/insert/overwrite
• Reformat paragraphs
• Monitor clipboard
• HTML entity conversion
• Cliptext palette
• Function list generation
• Line sort with options for de-dupe, case sensistivity, ascending/descending, start at column, ascii order
• Split views
• PC,Unix,Mac EOL modes
• On-screen line numbers with each line
• Print Preview (option to include line numbers)
• All program functions can be reassigned to different keyboard combinations
• User-configurable toolbar

Sorry, I guess I got carried away :) I really like this program though, and I've been using it for about three or four years now. It's probably the only program I've ever registered within 15 minutes of downloading :)

I don't like the default colors and font that come with it. I prefer dark backgrounds, so I always set the background to black, then let the lumance level of all the default syntax highlighting colors to "200". I also don't like the default variable-width font, as I prefer mono-spaced fonts, but I don't like Courier, so I set it to the windows "FixedSys" font. Once I've made these adjustments, EditPlus looks more like a UNIX terminal than a Visual* editor.

On the occasions I've considered switching to Linux, EditPlus is probably one of the few things holding me back from doing so.

I work exclusively with Edit Plus and I love it, however, I don't have a Mac and I've never used BBEdit so I don't know how it compares.

Follow the links on this page to see all the customization files that users have written: http://www.editplus.com/files.html

if you like textpad, try editplus. It has all the features that Textpad has, and tons more, and there are hundreds of user files you can download for just about any language that you might have heard of, and some that you probably haven't. It's also shareware, and less annoying than Textpad (just one screen that comes up when you open it, unlike Textpad which bugs you every so often when you try to save).

There was a good article with similar question (but for Java). Well, the program EditPlus has an intersting system of "scripting" that permit you to create menu with custom command, like compile, run, debug; in a dialog panel or directly in a ms-dos prompt, with any type of compiler. And the color coding of keywords is very good (in c/c++).

The negative aspect is that EditPlus isn't free.

• custom syntax highlighting. (plenty of filetypes are supported, and you can create your own syntax highlighting rules for files that aren't supported yet.)
• browser integration (unfortunately IE only)
• FTP integration for both text and binaries (which makes it a good candidate for web work)
• regular expression for search/replace
• built-in text manipulation capabilities (column select, sort column, trim trailing spaces, etc.)
• fast and stable app, unlimited undo/redo

We use Borland's JBuilder at our startup company for the past year and a half and most everyone has been very happy with it. It's a pure Java environment and will work on Linux (I ran JBuild exclusively on a SuSE Linux-ified Dell laptop at my last job) and runs very quickly, unlike Netbeans from what I've seen. There's an API for creating add-ons to the IDE and people have created many free ones out there (that one has a few and one that was hosted on Angelfire had a lot but is gone now).
My favorite is jVi which changes the editor to act like VI/VIM. I think JBuilder comes with an emacs editor option out of the box (zip file) as well. There's also Clearcase opentool that I used for a while but I've found it too slow for my taste in the long run.
A lot of Developers here use EditPlus for editing XML, XSL and JSP and they can't say enough good things about it. Personally I love VIM, it's good for what ails ya.

Remember, GUI != Mouse

No, because EditPlus is the One True Windows Editor.

Since the parent post didn't go into details about how to make your editor of choice the source code viewer for IE, I thought I would explain. It's easier than you think, and doesn't require registry hacking.

(The following instructions work for Windows 2000; if you're using 98, please adjust slightly. :)

1. Go to Tools/Folder Options in My Computer or Windows Explorer. Click the "File Types" tab.
2. Scroll down until you find HTML, PHP, or the file type you are currently viewing in your browser.
3. Click the Advanced button.
4. Edit the "Edit" type, or create a new type called "Edit."
5. Browse until you find the application you want. (I use EditPlus, which does source code highlighting for PHP/JSP/Perl.) Make sure the "Use DDE" box is unchecked.
6. Click OK until you are out of all of the dialog boxes.
7. Make sure the Edit button is showing in IE's toolbar. If it's not, make it show up by right-clicking on an empty area of your toolbar and clicking "Customize."
8. Open a new browser window and go to a URL that ends in .html or whatever file type you just edited.
9. The "Edit" button should show up, and you should be able to edit the page in your preferred editor. (Note: for Slashdot, you have to edit/create a file type in Windows for .pl.)

The real advantage of this is that you can set different types of files to open in different editors. For instance, I set HTML to open in Dreamweaver, but I set PHP to open in EditPlus.

HTH,
Erica

I've been working on a project to document software engineering methodology and best practices (eventually to be published and freely available). The content is written in XML. I wrote the DTDs for the basic document types and XSL stylesheets for output to HTML. I've written a few docs already for the system (two, three dozen or more). Some notes on my experience.

1) Editing: I find the XML editors available online to be slow to use. I don't want to click on a tree to navigate through my document--too much mouse work--and I find the format for editing individual nodes is cumbersome if you have a complex document structure. I settled on using a good text editor (EditPlus, not free) with some templates for automatically inserting large node sections that are typically edited in a block. The editor has syntax-highlighting so it's easy to differentiate the XML from the content. I also have template files for quickly starting a new document of each type, with all the basic nodes already pasted within so I can open a new template and start typing.

2) Display: I wrote some simple XSL sheets to start with, that just displayed the XML in a readable, basic HTML format. I have my editor linked to a script that transforms the current XML on command, and opens the HTML in the same editor--so I can quickly preview the results. I use the Apache Xalan XSL processor with Java JDK 1.3. I also have an Apache/Jakarta Ant script to transform all documents on comment. Since I started, I have spent some time improving the layout, but writing a basic XSL for display is not difficult--I recommend having basic ones around (no gifs, simple tables, etc.) for no-nonsense preview of the content.

3) Navigation: I have specific tags in my docs (like reference or ext-reference for linking documents. The XSL generates the appropriate tag for navigation, based on attributes in the tag. My newer approach is to generate either static links or a link to a Java servlet with the page name; the servlet then handles the navigation request. The servlet approach has the advantage that it can eventually transform documents on the fly, allow you to specify a transformation type (e.g. pretty, simple, text-only) and even to pull content from a repository.

4) Content management: Right now I use directories to manage the content, since I support 5 document types, and use the file names to distinguish the content. I spent a bunch of time when I started figuring out the DTDs of the various document types so I would organize content most efficiently and with little or no duplication of intent. I recommend that approach--it's been a lot easier, when I want to write, to identify the document type I want, open a template, and start typing. I think this is where the first real effort comes, not in picking an editor, etc., but in deciding exactly how the information will be categorized. It's important to have searchable content, or content you need to introspect, to be pulled out from the main. For example, in using a reference tag, I can write a verification routine that checks the reference is valid (e.g. if a file, check that the file exists). I try to avoid writing anything I would need to parse out--for example, dumping a code sample write within a text block. I'd rather have a code-sample tag for easy identification.

I'd stress that the biggest hassle has been getting the XSL to work properly and generate readable XML, especially for more involved document structures. It's easy to break and hard to debug! In that vein, I recommend starting with very simple XSLs that output really really simple HTML and building up from there.

-Pdoubleya

I can't count the number of times (in HTML or in any other language) I've accidentally left off the closing part of something (a tag, a comment, whatever) and inadvertantly nullified half of the file. Syntax highlighting is remarkably effecitve at preventing this and making you more productive overall (e.g. questions of "is that the right way to spell that reserved word" are moot when it's a different color when it's right).

On windows, my favorite programmer's editor ($20, 30 day trial shareware) is EditPlus. Small, fast, incredibly featureful and easy to extend. On Unix, Vim is the way to go (small, fast, simple interface you could learn in 10 minutes, syn coloring, etc.). If you're connecting into a remote unix machine to edit your code, check to make sure (ask the admins if need be) that your terminal emulator on the client machine is et right to support color (e.g. xterm-color for the $TERM variable).

If you're using windows and want a good free SSH and SCP (like a secure, network aware version of cp(unix)/copy(dos)), check out PuTTY SSH. Putty supports setting the TERM variable on login like I mentioned above. You can also use SSH to "tunnel" other applications over the encrypted stream (like FTP, checking mail, rsync, CVS, X11, etc etc.), but that's beyond the scope of this post (see the docs or do a web search).

--

'Perl development kit' - use a text editor, I do. Zap for RISC OS has a nice 'Perl syntax colouring' mode, and EditPlus does the same for Windows. Oh, if you bothered to check Perl.com, you'll now that Perl is available for Win32, Macintosh, 'UNIX' and RISC OS. Perl is a very handy language to know, and it's quick and simple. I know the 2nd edition of 'The Camel' has came in very useful for me, but it's also good to check on other resources.
Richy C.
--

You have missed out two of the best Editors for Windows, both of which have features he's looking for. Home Site Has FTP built in, syntax highlighting, you can map your files locally through Apache. You can Have Code Snippets of often used code. I think someone has added the PHP manual to the built in help (look at the contributed area on the Allaire website). Also there's Edit Plus which has FTP built in & syntax highlighting. I've been using this more recently, mainly because my laptop is only a Pentium 120 which is to slow for Home site. But Edit Plus still flys. Neil

Windows
Good:
Php Coder - builtin interpreter and function reference
EditPlus
Bad:
MPS PHP Editor
Indifferent:
HTML-Kit
Unix

*strike*code warrior*strike*Latte*strike*Glimmer

- this is the best notepad-style (with tabs for multiple files) Unix text editor - extensible, with adjustable background images, etc., scriptable in Python
[note the syntax highlighting file is suboptimal -

should be

Crossplatform
Emacs
Vim (PHP highlighting not very good)

But basically my personal recommendations:
syntax highlighting good, all else redundant

So choose the best editor out there; there's not much else you can do with PHP - it's not WYSIWYG suitable, and the functions are so high level, things *like* dialog editors are redundant. As for ftp, I strongly recommend that if you're on Unix, you install your system's PHP & Apache packages, and on Windows install PHP Triad, an integrated MySQL/PHP/Apache installer. This way you don't have to worry about FTP till you're finished [just a warning: always make sure your local PHP is *older* (or the same) as the one on the web server - v3, apart from having fewer functions, also has a lot of weird and undocumented bugs and misfeatures - e.g., you get errors if you call something $file (or class file); in v4 you can instantiate

class classname {
// No constructor
}

with $object=new classname();
but v3 only allows brackets when the class has a constructor.

Here's how I work:

editor w/syntax highlighting, editing files direct - so much nicer than FTP, and without the FTP problems
browser window set to PHP manual (locally, for speed)
browser set to view PHP pages (Opera is good for this purpose because of its MDI (hint: use 4 and 5 to tab between windows), which generally sucks, but is good in this case cos you don't have to open lots of windows)