Since version 2.0 Aptana stopped supporting their own fork of the Eclipse PDT I’ve been searching for another editor. I got feed up with how slow it is, all the bloatware, installing the PDT was made me loose an entire day and I honestly believed there had to exist a better editor for Windows.
I must have lost several days searching and testing different editors!
What I want from a Code Editor:
- Really good and easy to use FTP manager
- Code completion for css (it saves me a ton of time). It has to be automatic. When I write it should start showing suggestions.
- Good code coloring
- Fast and good looking.
Sounds simple enough right? Well… not really. Out of all of the Code Editors out there for Windows (including the ones you have to pay for – except Dreamweaver that is just to expensive to be taken seriously) there is just a handful of editors that fit the bill: Notepadd++ (however the FTP is full of bugs and sometimes just refuses to work), UltraEdit (it flickers when you’re using auto-completion – I think it redraws the screen every time I press a key) and jEdit.
jEdit to the rescue
Why didn’t I try jEdit before? I always thought it was a Java only editor. But boy I was wrong. It appears it just requires Java JRE.
So why use jEdit? Because everything works (at least for what I need it for), good FTP, good code completion, fast and it looks good. Oh! Did I mention that is FREE, GPL and supports plugins?
I honestly hope my search for a Code Editor stops here, if not I’m going to start writing my own 
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3 Comments
I’ve been using Notepad++ and except a few crashes and FTP bugs it worked fine for me, but if you say jEdit is faster and better and I actually already have it installed (it came with the development kit of Ren’Py) I must try it out! Thanks for the recommendation^^
I can’t quite figure out how you had to spend a whole day to install PDT to it. It’s just a simple plugin you have to install and shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes.
Yes, but in the latest version it doesn’t work by default because some gateway(or what ever it’s called) isn’t activated. So when you try to install it can’t because it can’t connect to the server. However this info is almost nowhere to be found on the Aptana website. It was lost in some forgotten corner of the forums. Also on the home laptop after installing PDT it just crashes immediately after opening a .php file.
I just like things to work without having to search tons of forum pages.