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 .

No related posts.