Editor Comparison

I’ve used a few editors for various tasks, and each has advantages and disadvantages over the others. Personally, I’ve played with Dreamweaver, Notepad++, Sublime Text, and Eclipse. Some of these are a bit more popular than others. For more information, visit Wikipedia Comparison of HTML Editors.

Notepad++

I love how basic this editor is. I’m probably most familiar with this one since I’ve used it the most. I like the default functionality to duplicate entire lines or line segments. Not many others allow this full functionality. Also, if you highlight a variable or full word, it highlights all its other uses on the same document. This feature is great for when you are checking if you spelled the variable right, or when you are trying to follow along with code that has no comments. There is a nice plug-in manager that allows a few plug-ins. One item I really enjoy is being able to have a “project” which I can upload to a remote server. Currently, I have not found a single plug-in that allows both of these.

Dreamweaver

This one is probably one of the most common editors you will encounter when doing web development. It’s adaptable to multiple languages and usually comes with an Adobe package. The built- in project management is nice; it allows you to set them up with more features than you will ever need. I would like to see the projects be manageable in folders, which helps when you manage over 10 projects. The biggest downfall I found with Dreamweaver is that it slows my computer down quite a bit when I bring it back into focus after a few minutes.

Sublime Text

This is one of the newer editors I’ve encountered, and I still wouldn’t consider myself a pro at using it quite yet. When you open it up, it’s a very light-weight editor with the ability to add plug-ins. The plug-ins I found were extremely easy to develop with all sorts of documentation and code examples. There are already tons of plug-ins available. There is a project manager plug-in which I found very useful, but it doesn’t currently have all the features I’d love. However when speaking with the developer of the plug-in, he did mention he would be adding these features.

Eclipse

This was one of the first editors I used that offered syntax highlighting. Before that I was using… Window’s Notepad. Dreadful, I know. There are a few versions for various languages including Java, PHP, and C/C++. The project management was a very nice feature for me, and still is. It’s not a tiny editor, but so far I’ve never had it slow down my computer.

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Blaine Schmeisser