Text Editors

These days text editors are more than what they stand for. Gone are the days where text editors were meant to open simple text files. The new editors provide a myriad of editing features including script formatting capabilities. We take a look at a few editors we consider the cream of the crop.

Editor's Pick - Allaire's HomeSite 4
HomeSite 3 was a boon for ASP programmers. Back in those days Visual Interdev had just made its debut and people were finding it hard to work with. They needed something simple, so most relied on the ubiquitous Notepad, well... until HomeSite came along. HomeSite 3 provided create and edit HTML, ASP and CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language) pages, but no WYSIWYG capabilities.

HomeSite 4 is a greatly improved version of its predecessor. It contains a complete WYSIWYG editor to along with HTML tag help, script formatting, style editor, tag validator, etc. Also included is "CodeSweeper" that checks if the tags conform to user/default tag settings. In addition, the HTML validator checks if the HTML is upto HTML 3.2/4 standards. There is also a link validator that checks to see if the links on the page lead somewhere or not. You can also edit remote files without using FTP.

Also the code tabs make it easier to drop tags into the code instead of typing them out. This is highly useful in ASP/CFML, especially in CFML where you can insert almost any CFML construct without typing it.

All these features make this a highly recommended text editor.