Here we go:

1. UltraEdit: Very solid editor, just added folding. I don’t like the way to manage syntax highlighting. Fonts don’t get hinted, and FTP can’t be viewed in a pane. Otherwise good (though a bit ugly visually!)

2. PSPad: Wonderful interface, very good feature set. BUT rendered useless by awful font rendering (only monospace fonts with occasional glyph errors) and problems with editing UTF-8 and non UTF-8 encodings together. A real shame it is not the dev’s fault but he uses an editor component which has these limitations.

3. SciTE / Notepad2 (both based on scintilla): The BEST looking syntax highlighting, great code completion, folding; a brilliant editor component. I love SciTE as it is fast and powerful. But neither one has FTP.

4. EditPlus 2: solid editor, syntax highlighting can be flaky sometimes, FTP support good though it is not multi-threaded. Font display is superb – allows 5 fonts to be setup and switched. Everything is solid, but nothing is exceptional.

5. Crimson Editor: basically a clone of EditPlus2, though a good clone at that. My only problem is that FTP is not viewable in a pane. Great feature is line-spacing; there is good evidence to show that bigger line-spacing improves legibility and reading comprehension, yet ALL editors only ever set 100% line-spacing – in crimson editor it is adjustable – kudos to the dev on that!

6. Topstyle 3: Amazing for CSS, good for XHTML, but not a workhorse editor, none of the solid encoding support etc I need.

7. Homesite: I have a registered version from a Dreamweaver install. I just don’t understand what is so amazing. Must have been great when it first came out though…

8. JEdit: Very powerful and solid. FTP handling superb. Lots of raw editing power and extensible close to the point of self-sentience! Only gripes are font-smoothing is not as good as native methods, and slow to start.

Conclusions: No editor has yet to satisfy my needs! I’ll stick with CrimsonEditor (faster) and JEdit (power) – though FTP explorer of editplus may draw me to the “original”! No editor seems to support PCRE regex which is really annoying, they all use different variations :grrr:

http://www.notetab.com/

ps: i used to work with jEdit cause it had a nice UI but it was just too slow

I actually only started using EditPlus because HomeSite 4.1 was doing this really annoying thing where it would nuke the contents of a file /during a save/. I stopped using it for a bit until I could upgrade to version 5, but by that time I was hooked on EditPlus.

I especially like EditPlus’ backup feature. It’s vital for me when working on remote FTP files. When you hit Ctrl-S, it first makes a local backup of what you are saving into a backup directory and /then/ tries to upload it. That has saved me so many times when the upload has either timed out, or failed mid-upload.

I tried EditPlus, but it kept f*cking up the syntax highlighting on comments in PHP

I tried a few of the others, but they were a little slow and ackward.

I have the issue of wanting a program that can handle HTML, PHP, and CSS very nicely when it’s all in a single file – which is aparently difficult to find.

I can’t say the UI is slick like SmartFTP or something right out of VS.Net 2005, but it’s not Windows 3.1 for sure.

It is simple to use but difficult to configure (i.e. configuration is done through a conf file with all the options being shown) however, out of the box it is very usable.

I use it to edit PHP, HTML, CSS, C++, Fortran, Text.

Of course it is free (gratis and libre).

I used the installer from http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/apps/SciTE/en/index.html but it is not the most recent version.

It’s the best I’ve found so far.

It’s freeware, is stable in my win98SE box, has all the features I need and then *MANY* more.

It also has built in FTP which I find myself using more and more.

It word wraps correctly and will even display the edited file in a browser using a localhost server.

My 2 cents… :)

http://www.context.cx/

You’ll thank yourself for giving it a look.

Its got tabs!