Greg K — Sat, 19 May 2007 21:30:18 +0000

Notepad is a very basic editor, not much in formatting, where wordpad is more formatting.

IMO if you are doing any decent aount of coding, I would look for an alternative. Until I bought Zend Studio, I always used Ultra Edit. It was cheap (yeah it is not free, but there are a TON of features in there). There are three things I find it well worth the money over the years. Has a good spell checker, has syntax highlighting for many languages, has direct OPEN/SAVE to an FTP server, bracket matching and collapsing, and many others. Ultra edit has the option for line wrapping, either automatically for you (actually doing line breaks) or visual line wraps. Also it has a pretty good macro system. There are times it's COLUMN MODE comes in handy (lets you select a rectangular section of text to copy and paste, anyone who ever used ansi draw would know what I mean).

Even though I do have Zend Studio, I still have Ultra Edit set up as my default text editor in windows, and will use it for some tasks. And there are times I will use the CODE view of Dreamweaver (yes I have the fancy toys), mainly for javascript. Also, sometimes for a quick change I'll just log into the server using SSH and use PICO to makea quick change.

If you want to check out Ultra Edit, it is at UltraEdit.com Just don't get overwhelmed by all the features. Do what I did, start out using the ones you know, and then when you get time either play with or look at the help for some menu items you are curious about. There are several cool featuers I have found just playing.

I just looked at the site for ConTEXT, looks pretty powerful itself, so you may want to try that. Some will say go for that since it is "free" where UltraEdit costs, however, I feel if you really use it a lot, the respectful thing is to donate, so either of them should "cost" you.

The most important thing is to be comfortable with whatever you use.

-Greg